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EMAIL: Malea Powell, Editor, CCC, ccceditorialteam@gmail.com

MAIL: Malea Powell, Editor, College Composition and Communication, Michigan State University, 619 Red Cedar Road, B-382 Wells Hall, East Lansing MI 48824

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CCC Editorial Transition

The current editor’s term will end with the December 2024 issue, and they have finished reading submissions for their remaining time as editor. The incoming editors—Matthew Davis of the University of Massachusetts Boston and Kara Taczak of the University of Central Florida—have begun reading submissions and will publish their first issue in February 2025. We appreciate your interest in publishing your work in College Composition and Communication.

CCC Submission Guidelines

The editorial staff of College Composition and Communication (CCC) invites submission of research and scholarship in composition studies that supports college teachers in reflecting on and improving their practices in teaching writing. The field of composition studies draws on research and theories from a broad range of humanistic disciplines— English studies, linguistics, literacy studies, rhetoric, cultural studies, LGBT studies, gender studies, critical theory, education, technology studies, race studies, communication, philosophy of language, anthropology, sociology, and others—and within composition studies, a number of subfields have also developed, such as technical communication, computers and composition, writing across the curriculum, research practices, history of composition, assessment, and writing center work.

Articles for CCC may come out of the discussions within and among any of these fields, as long as the argument presented is clearly relevant to the work of college writing teachers and responsive to recent scholarship in composition studies. The usefulness of articles to writing teachers should be apparent in the discussion, but articles need not contain explicit sections detailing applications to teaching practices.

In writing for CCC, you should consider a diverse readership for your article, a readership that includes at least all teachers of college-level writing at diverse institutions and literacy centers, and may include administrators, undergraduate and graduate students, legislators, corporate employers, parents, and alumni. To address such an audience, you need not avoid difficult theories or complex discussions of research and issues or detailed discussions of pedagogy; rather you should consider the interests and perspectives of the variety of readers who are affected by your theories, pedagogies, and policies.

Genre, Format, Length, Documentation. You are encouraged to submit articles in whatever genre and format best fits your purposes, and to use alternate genres and formats if they best express your meanings; similarly, the use of endnotes and subheadings should align with your purposes and meanings. Most articles in CCC run between 4,000 and 7,000 words (or approximately 16–28 double-spaced pages), though articles may be shorter or longer in line with your purposes. Submissions should follow the current (8th) edition of the MLA Handbook. NCTE’s Statement on Gender and Language can be found here: http://www.ncte.org/positions/statements/genderfairuseoflang.

Research Practices and Citing Unpublished Work. If your article reports the results of empirical or observational research, you need to be attentive to the ethics as well as the validity of your research methods. Before submitting your work for consideration, please be aware that, if you use, quote, or otherwise reproduce unpublished writing by students or teachers or others, you should either have clearance from your local IRB or permission in writing from the writers to do so, even if you use their writing anonymously. Click HERE to read/download a copy of the CCC permission form needed to include the work of others in your submission (especially student work).

Submission and Review of Articles. All manuscripts should be submitted electronically. Please register as an author at our Web-based manuscript submission and review system, Editorial Manager (https://www.editorialmanager.com/cccj). Once logged in to the system, follow the instructions to upload your submission. If you’re submitting work for a special issue, be sure to indicate in the comments section the issue date for which you are submitting (e.g., June 2020 issue). Receipt of submissions will be acknowledged by email. Articles will be read blind by outside reviewers, so please make sure that your submission is sufficiently anonymized. Your name should not appear on the title page or first page and you should not identify yourself in the text or in the list of works cited. Direct questions to editor Malea Powell at ccceditorialteam@gmail.com.

Interchanges. Responses to articles that raise important issues or different perspectives will be considered for publication in the Interchanges section. Please phrase any differences with the article you are responding to in a tone respectful to the writer and to the profession. Responses usually run between 500 and 2,000 words (approximately 2–8 double-spaced pages). Sets of short related articles may also be submitted to or solicited by the editor for the Interchanges section.

Book ReviewsCCC is not accepting book reviews at this time.

 

CCC Podcasts–Jacqueline Preston

Jacqueline Preston
A conversation with Jacqueline Preston, author of “Project(ing) Literacy: Writing to Assemble in a Postcomposition FYW Classroom.”  (8:45)

Jacqueline Preston is an assistant professor in the Department of Basic Composition at Utah Valley University. Her work has been published in Community Literacy Journal and College Composition and Communication. She is a contributor to the forthcoming collections, Class in Composition: Working Class and Pedagogy and Working Writing Programs: A Reference of Innovations, Issues, and Opportunities. Most recently, with Joshua C. Hilst, she has coauthored The Write Project: A Concise Rhetoric for the Writing Classroom.
 

 

Top Intellectual Property Development Annual Series

Since 2005, the NCTE-CCCC’s Intellectual Property Committee and the Intellectual Property (IP) Caucus have been sponsoring a wonderful annual resource, “Top Intellectual Property Developments” for each respective year. The 2008 Top Intellectual Property Developments have been just recently published and can be viewed here:

/cccc/committees/ip/2008developments

Links to the 2005, 2006, and 2007 Top Intellectual Property Developments are located on the main IP Committee Webpage:

/cccc/committees/ip

The top developments for 2008 were assembled and edited by Clancy Ratliff. Clancy has also edited the 2007 top developments, while John Logie, past-Chair of the IP Committee, began the first set of publications, and assembled and edited both the 2006 and 2005 top stories.

In her introduction to the 2008 articles covering top developments in IP for teachers of writing, Clancy states: “I hope that you, the readers, will find that the articles help to achieve our committee’s first charge, to keep the rhetoric and composition community informed about developments related to intellectual property that affect our work as teachers and scholars.”

Top Developments for 2008 were written by contributors Kim Dian Gainer, Radford University, Laurie Cubbison, Radford University, Clancy Ratliff, and Traci A. Zimmerman, James Madison University and covered such topic as the Google Book Settlement, the case of J. K. Rowling v. RDR Books, Open Access in 2008, and “The Plight of Orphan Works and the Possibility of Reform.”

For more information about the top developments annual collection, or how you can be a contributor, please contact Clancy Ratliff.

Intellectual Property Reports Main Page

The 2014 CCCC Intellectual Property Annual: An Opportunity to Contribute

This year is the tenth anniversary of the CCCC-IP Annual, a publication created to fulfill the CCCC Intellectual Property Committee’s charge to keep the Conference on College Composition and Communication’s membership informed on key events and developments in intellectual property that took place over the previous year. Archives can be found at /cccc/committees/ip.

As 2014 nears its end, we are looking back on what happened over the course of the year in copyright legislation, fair use cases, open access publishing, and notable high-profile plagiarism cases. Developments regularly challenge our notions of what these terms mean, and we engage these developments in a timely manner each year in the CCCC-IP Annual. Typically, each article explains a particular development in intellectual property and analyzes its implications for teachers and scholars of rhetoric and composition. For example, the 2012 Annual contains an analysis of the rise of MOOCs written by James Porter.

Starting this year, we are encouraging multiple genres, such as short (1000-1500 words) scholarly articles, listicles (“7 Things Rhetoricians Need to Know about the Frontiers in Innovation, Research, Science and Technology (FIRST) Act”), and infographics.

Some articles for the 2014 Annual have already been planned and are in progress (a working table of contents appears below this CFP). Ideas for additional submissions are listed immediately below, but we welcome additional ideas.

  • review of Electronic Frontier Foundation white paper published October 27, 2014: “Who Has Your Back: When Copyright and Trademark Bullies Threaten Free Speech, available at ” https://www.eff.org/press/releases/which-service-providers-side-users-ip-disputes
  • review of EFF white paper “Unintended Consequences: 16 Years Under the DMCA”; available at https://www.eff.org/files/2014/09/16/unintendedconsequences2014.pdf
  • review of EFF white paper “Open Wi-Fi and Copyright: A Primer for Network Operators”; see https://www.eff.org/wp/open-wi-fi-and-copyright-primer-network-operators and  https://www.eff.org/files/2014/06/03/open-wifi-copyright.pdf
  • report on Internet Slowdown campaign; see  https://www.battleforthenet.com/sept10th/ and https://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/43692
  • report on FIRST Act (open access),; see  https://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/42765
  • report on Open Source Seed Initiative:; see https://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/42771

Please write to Clancy Ratliff if you are interested in contributing to this year’s Annual by writing about one of the above topics or other current events in copyright, authorship, and intellectual property. Manuscripts will be due February 28, 2015, for publication about one week before the CCCC convention.

Working Table of Contents, 2014 CCCC-IP Annual:

  • Kim Gainer, Georgia State University fair use case update
  • Wendy Warren Austin, Slavoj Žižek book review plagiarism case
  • Laurie Cubbison, Nic Pizzolatto “True Detective” plagiarism accusation
  • Karen Lunsford, California open access law on publicly funded research
  • Steven Engel, Montana senator John Walsh plagiarism case
  • Mike Edwards, review of EFF white paper “Collateral Damages: Why Congress Needs to Fix Copyright Law’s Civil Penalties”
  • Traci Zimmerman, review of documentary film “The Internet’s Own Boy: The Story of Aaron Swartz”

Intellectual Property Reports Main Page

Report of the Meeting of the Annual CCCC Intellectual Property Caucus

Meeting Date: Weds. April 6, 2011
Location: Atlanta, Georgia

In April, the Intellectual Property Caucus met in Atlanta, GA at the annual Conference on College Composition and Communication. Open to all registrants at the conference, the yearly meeting of the caucus provides an opportunity for participants to learn about intellectual property (IP)-related developments during the previous twelve months as well as to join in roundtable discussions about continuing or pending IP issues likely to affect instructors and students.

Summary of Roundtable Discussions

Among the roundtables this year was one at which participants discussed the implications of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) for teaching and learning. Participants at this roundtable agreed that it is necessary to advocate for the extension of current exemptions that allow university and college instructors, as well as and film and media studies students, to bypass encryption in order to make fair use of video clips. They also resolved to advocate for the extensions of those exemptions to K-12 students and teachers, as well as to all college and university students regardless of whether they are enrolled in film or media studies courses. To these ends, caucus members will need to respond to upcoming calls for comments and testimony on the DMCA and to encourage their colleagues to do likewise.

In terms of reaching out to their colleagues, caucus participants set two additional goals: to inform educators and administrators of their current rights under the DMCA and to legally point them in the direction of tools that allow users to bypass digital protection in order to make fair use of videos for educational purposes. Finally, DMCA roundtable participants set a long-term goal: to advocate for a change in the law that restricts the dissemination of information about how to defeat encryption. This is an important goal since the current law is rather paradoxical: while current exemptions allow users to break digital codes (in order to make fair use of video clips for educational purposes), there is no clearly stated exemption for the dissemination of information about how to defeat encryption. As a result, instructors and students may desire to make fair use of video clips but lack the necessary tools. Roundtable participants agreed that the right to make fair use of resources is meaningless without the means to do so.

Another roundtable discussed the relationship between students’ rights to their own writing and to the writing of others.  In questioning how new media technologies (listservs, blogs, wikis, social networking sites) complicate traditional conceptualizations and definitions of IP, the participants of this roundtable found themselves looking carefully at the ways in which plagiarism policies are articulated institutionally and nationally.  Participants agreed that there may be a need to revisit and revise such plagiarism policies and statements so that they are responsive to new media technology.  Participants were also interested in how best to respond to institutional pressures to use plagiarism detection software as well as the general trend toward “surveillance mechanisms” in course management tools.  In thinking about the recent conflict over access to a university professor’s emails in Wisconsin, these kinds of questions are not only relevant but of great importance to our profession.

Among the issues discussed by other roundtables were how best to teach IP issues to our students, to understand the implications of current open access/fair use court cases to our work in the classroom, and to identify and utilize the current research and publications on IP issues.  Each of these tables addressed the need for educators to advocate for and implement open source software solutions, as well as to address the fact that plagiarism, fair use, and “remix” are often introduced as restrictions in the writing classroom, rather than as concepts to be explored and understood.  In particular, the participants at the “Teaching IP with RiP!” roundtable looked at the ways in which Brett Gaylor’s documentary RiP: A Remix Manifesto can be used to help students understand the landscape of IP and the corresponding ways in which they can compose and create in that “contested” space.  Those participants tracking the open access/fair use court cases were most interested in the Cambridge University Press et al. v. Georgia State court case as its ruling will have far reaching implications in terms of the form (print/online) and amount of material that teachers can use (fairly) in their courses.  Caucus participants reiterated the need for educators to provide unrestricted access to data through the creation of open access archives where both scholarship and student work could be deposited.   To that end, participants suggested a number of specific IP resources that could be created, such as a “web style guide” written specifically for student use.  Members of the caucus will continue to follow the process by which the federal government develops its intellectual property enforcement strategy in hopes of keeping the needs of students and educators in the forefront.  This will become especially important in the coming months, as the DMCA tri-annual rulemaking hearings are just around the corner (2012).

Next Year’s CCCC-IP Caucus – St. Louis, Missouri 2012

Caucus members are in the process of preparing proposals for roundtables for the 2012 caucus, which will take place in St. Louis, Missouri .  Coordinating the proposals is the new senior chair of the caucus, Martine Courant Rife, a professor of writing in the English Department at Lansing Community College, Michigan, who has been teaching online, face-to-face, and hybrid freshman composition, argumentation, technical and business writing, and advanced writing for over ten years.  In addition to chairing the caucus, Martine has served for the past two years as Editor of the NCTE- IP Committee/Caucus Inbox Project.  Anyone with questions about the caucus and/or the plans for its annual meeting in 2012 can contact Martine at martinerife@gmail.com

Submitted for the CCCC-IP CaucusTraci A. Zimmerman Ph.D., Senior Chair of the IP Caucus
Associate Professor
School of Writing, Rhetoric & Technical Communication
James Madison University

Intellectual Property Reports Main Page

The CCCC-IP Annual: Top Intellectual Property Developments of 2011

Once again the CCCC Intellectual Property Committee announces the publication of the Conference on College Composition Communication Intellectual Property Annual—the seventh issue since 2005. That this Annual has maintained this degree of longevity bespeaks our discipline’s commitment to copyright, intellectual property, and authorship as key concerns. Throughout 2011, the battle between the content industries and the copyright activists continued, but other powerful internet industries have started lobbying for a free and open communication network. This year’s Annual engages this rhetorical situation as well as developments in the circulation of scholarly publications.

In the annual’s first article, “The Defeat of the Research Works Act and Its Implications,” Mike Edwards traces the introduction and short career of the Research Works Act (RWA), a proposal that would have rolled back free and open access to government-funded research and placed that access under the control of publishers. After the publishers who backed the bill met considerable public criticism, the representatives who had introduced the Research Works Act announced that they would no longer attempt to bring the bill to a vote, and the proposed act died in committee. The abandonment of support for the Research Works Act is a significant victory for those in academia who support free and open access to research, especially research paid for by the American taxpayer.

The second article, “Open Access Initiatives,” was contributed by Annette Vee. Recently, the Princeton University Faculty Senate approved an “open access” policy for faculty research, adding the university’s name to a growing list of research institutions opting for such policies. Harvard University adopted a similar policy in 2005 (the first of such kind in the United States) and MIT did in 2008. Following the lead of these elite institutions, many others have adopted or are considering adopting open access policies, both in the United States and elsewhere. This move in “open access” from buzzword to policy affects the publication, circulation, and readership of our scholarship, and this article outlines trends in open access initiatives, some of their recent precedents, and a few of the most salient implications for our scholarship.

The next article, “One Step Forward, Two Steps Back: What Golan v. Holder means for the Future of the Public Domain,” was written by Traci Zimmerman. For a time, one surety in the complex world of copyright law and IP regulations was this: that once information passes into the public domain, it is free for all to use. But a recent decision by the Supreme Court casts even this knowledge into the realm of uncertainty. At issue in the case of Golan v. Holder was whether Congress has the right to retroactively restore copyright to foreign works in the public domain, works that may have “slipped into” the public domain while still copyrighted abroad. A bill adopted in 1994 had placed foreign works back under the shield of copyright protection in order to align U.S. policy with the Berne Convention, an international copyright treaty. For conductor Lawrence Golan, who initiated the case, the removal of works from the public domain meant that he suddenly had limited access to pieces that he had been playing freely for years. The implications of the ruling will extend far beyond the realms of sheet music and scores. Throughout academia and in libraries and archives, students, scholars, and the public at large will find themselves affected by Golan v. Holder.

The Golan v. Holder article reports on litigation over a bill that is on the books; the next article in the Annual reports on the battle over proposed legislation that did not move beyond the committee stage. “Sentence First—Verdict Afterwards”: The Protect IP and the Stop Online Piracy Acts,” submitted by Kim Gainer, describes two bills that were introduced into Congress that had the potential to restrict the growth and development of web services. The intent of each was to prevent the use of the web to link to or transmit copyrighted material without permission or compensation of copyright holders. Both bills in particular targeted foreign “rogue websites,” but the web’s nature is such that numerous companies and organizations based in the United States would have been affected by the bills—including many that were not themselves copyright infringers. Less than a year after the introduction of the first bill, both had been withdrawn, having been vigorously opposed by powerful corporations whose business models depend upon an open web, by organizations and individuals that raised questions about the impact of the bills on First Amendment rights, and by organizations and individuals concerned about the cultural and educational impact of the bills.

In addition to opposition from the constituencies described above, both bills met with opposition from consumers/creators of content that copyright holders laid claim to. The mobilization of these consumers/creators is a phenomenon dealt with in Laurie Cubbison’s article in this issue of the Annual: “A Dark Day on the Internet Leads to a Sea Change in Copyright Policy.” The “Dark Day” of the title refers to January 18, 2012, when Wikipedia went black and a black bar replaced the Google logo. In addition, many other Internet sites, including Reddit, Boingboing.net, and Wired.com, also went dark, all in order to protest consideration of the two bills. As the protest included sites commonly used by students for online research, teachers and students were made aware of copyright and intellectual property issues in a new and startling way. Students often serve as producers of content for such sites and so are also affected by copyright legislation that seeks to restrict user-created content that incorporates copyrighted material, such as videos that include copyrighted music or images. In leading a challenge to these bills, the Internet companies changed the discourse around copyright and intellectual property law in the 21st century. At one time the major media conglomerates who run the movie, television and music industries dominated copyright policy, but in 2012 Internet companies and consumers defeated legislation championed by these media conglomerates, indicating that copyright policy may no longer be dominated by content owners.

The last article in this year’s Annual, “Occupy Trademark: Branding a Political Movement This Intellectual Property,” examines the emergence of trademark applications and disputes associated with the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement. The article provides a detailed overview of the ongoing trademark disputes associated with the political movement by tracing the initial applications to register OWS as a trademark and documenting the competing claims by different parties that are attempting to assert ownership of terms, slogans, and branding associated with OWS. The article describes a case in which member of the broader OWS movement was subjected to threats of legal action for appropriating the trademark of another entity, and it outlines the implications of such examples for the discipline of rhetoric and composition.

This year’s Intellectual Property Annual will be available at this link: /cccc/committees/ip. Previous Annuals are available at this link as well.

IP Annual Editor:
Clancy Ratliff, assistant professor, Department of English, and Director of First-Year Writing, University of Louisiana at Lafayette

Contributors to this year’s Annual:
Timothy R. Amidon, Ph.D. student and teaching assistant, English and Writing Departments, University of Rhode Island
Laurie Cubbison, Director of Writing, Radford University
Mike Edwards, assistant professor, Department of English and Philosophy, United States Military Academy at West Point
Kim D. Gainer, professor of English, Radford University
Annette Vee, assistant professor of English, University of Pittsburgh
Traci Zimmerman, associate professor, School of Writing, Rhetoric, and Technical Communication, James Madison University

This column is sponsored by the Intellectual Property Committee of the CCCC (/cccc/committees/ip) and the by CCCC-Intellectual Property Caucus (http://groups.google.com/group/intellectual-property-caucus). The IP Caucus maintains a mailing list. If you would like to receive notices of programs sponsored by the Caucus or of opportunities to submit articles either to this column or to the annual report on intellectual property issues, please contact kgainer@radford.edu.

 

Intellectual Property Reports Main Page

Top Intellectual Property Developments of 2016

Downloadable PDF of the full report.

Introduction to the 2016 Annual
Clancy Ratliff

Needless to say, 2016 was a humdinger of a year. We will remember it primarily as the year that Donald Trump shockingly received more electoral votes than Hillary Clinton in the
presidential election, and the year we lost many talented artists, including David Bowie,
Prince, George Michael, Carrie Fisher, and the very next day her mother, Debbie Reynolds.
It was also the year that the largest number of Indigenous tribes in a century gathered for
months at the Standing Rock reservation to protest the construction of the Dakota Access
Pipeline, a struggle that continues in the courts. Intellectual property developments
continued as always, as the eight excellent articles in this year’s CCCC-IP Annual show. Read on (full report).

 Table of Contents
 1 Introduction to the 2016 Annual
Clancy Ratliff
 3 Plagiarism in the Age of Trump
Camryn Washington, Joseph Myrick III, and Steven Engel
 11 Corruption, Higher Ed, and Russians (Oh My!)
Craig A. Meyer
 16 What’s in a Meme?
Cristina Hanganu-Bresch
 24 Snaps Without Props: Snapchat’s Blatant (Mis)Appropriation of Makeup Artistry
Devon Fitzgerald Ralston
 30 Fair Use and Feminist Critique: That’swhatshesaid’s (Copyright) Commentary
Chris Gerben
 34 A Case of Cruciverbal Coincidence, Carelessness, or the Great #Gridgate Scandal?
Wendy Warren Austin 
 40 Cultural Property versus Intellectual Property: The Cultural Appropriation Debate
Kim Gainer
 48 Shades of Things to Come? Apple Patents Technology to Remotely Disable iPhone Cameras
Traci A. Zimmerman
 52  Contributors

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