Uncategorized Archives - Page 19 of 77 - Conference on College Composition and Communication

Student Veterans in the College Composition Classroom

This document first identifies multiple assets student veterans often bring to writing classrooms and then acknowledges some of the special considerations that writing instructors and WPAs should take into account when working with student veterans. After presenting these generalizations, the document offers classroom instructors and WPAs some more detailed answers to the question, “What do I need to know about working with student veterans?” A list of references and further reading, organized roughly by field of study—from composition and writing studies to disability studies and student services—is provided at the end of the document. This organizational structure is meant to present a deliberate move away from deficit-model thinking about military veterans—that veterans are damaged or unprepared or otherwise problematic—to representing military servicemembers as considerable assets and sources of strength, vision, and leadership for our universities, colleges, and our society at large.

Read the full statement, Student Veterans in the College Composition Classroom: Realizing Their Strengths and Assessing Their Needs (March 2015)

Writing Assessment: A Position Statement

Conference on College Composition and Communication
November 2006 (revised March 2009, reaffirmed November 2014, revised April 2022)

Introduction

Writing assessment can be used for a variety of purposes, both inside the classroom and outside: supporting student learning, assigning a grade, placing students in appropriate courses, allowing them to exit a course or sequence of courses, certifying proficiency, and evaluating programs. Given the high-stakes nature of many of these assessment purposes, it is crucial that assessment practices be guided by sound principles that are fair and just and specific to the people for whom and the context and purposes for which they are designed. This position statement aims to provide that guidance for writing teachers and administrators across institutional types and missions.

We encourage faculty, administrators, students, community members, and other stakeholders to reflect on the ways the principles, considerations, and practices articulated in this document are present in their current assessment methods and to consider revising and rethinking their practices to ensure that inclusion and language diversity, teaching and learning, and ethical labor practices inform every level of writing assessment.

Foundational Principles of Writing Assessment

This position statement identifies six principles that form the ethical foundation of writing assessment.

Writing assessments are important means for guiding teaching and learning. Writing assessments—and assignments to which they correlate—should be designed and implemented in pursuit of clearly articulated learning goals.
The methods and criteria used to assess writing shape student perceptions of writing and of themselves as writers.
Assessment practices should be solidly grounded in the latest research on learning, literacies, language, writing, equitable pedagogy, and ethical assessment.
Writing is by definition social. In turn, assessing writing is social. Teaching writing and learning to write entail exploring a range of purposes, audiences, social and cultural contexts and positions, and mediums.
Writers approach their writing with different attitudes, experiences, and language practices. Writers deserve the opportunity to think through and respond to numerous rhetorical situations that allow them to incorporate their knowledges, to explore the perspectives of others, and to set goals for their writing and their ongoing development as writers.
Writing and writing assessment are labor-intensive practices. Labor conditions and outcomes must be designed and implemented in pursuit of both the short-term and long-term health and welfare of all participants.

Considerations for Designing Writing Assessments

Based on the six foundational principles detailed in the previous section, this section enumerates key considerations that follow from these principles for the design, interpretation, and implementation of writing assessments, whether formative or summative or at the classroom or programmatic level.

Considerations for Inclusion and Language Diversity

Best assessment practice is contextual. It is designed and implemented to address the learning needs of a full range of students in the local context, and involves methods and criteria that are locally developed, deriving from the particular context and purposes for the writing being assessed. (1, 2)

Best assessment practice requires that learning goals, assessment methods, and criteria for success be equitable, accessible, and appropriate for each student in the local context. To meet this requirement, assessments are informed by research focused on the ways assignments and varied forms of assessment affect diverse student groups. (3)

Best assessment practice recognizes that mastery is not necessarily an indicator of excellence. It provides opportunities for students to demonstrate their strengths in writing, displaying the strategies or skills taught in the relevant environment. Successful summative and formative assessment empowers students to make informed decisions about how to meet their goals as writers. (4, 5)

Best assessment practice respects language as complicated and diverse and acknowledges that as purposes vary, criteria will as well. Best assessment practices provide multiple paths to success, accounting for a range of diverse language users, and do not arbitrarily or systematically punish linguistic differences. (3, 4, 5)

Considerations for Learning and Teaching

Best assessment practice engages students in contextualized, meaningful writing. Strong assessments strive to set up writing tasks and situations that identify purposes that are appropriate to, and that appeal to, the particular students being assessed. (4, 5)

Best assessment practice clearly communicates what is valued and expected of writing practices. It focuses on measuring specific outcomes defined within the program or course. Values, purposes, and learning goals should drive assessment, not the reverse. (1, 6)

Best assessment practice relies on new developments to shape assessment methods that prioritize student learning. Best assessment practice evolves. Revisiting and revising assessment practices should be considered periodically, as research in the field develops and evolves, and/or as the assessment needs or circumstances change. (3)

Best assessment practice engages students in the assessment process, contextualizing the method and purpose of the assessment for students and all other stakeholders. Where possible, these practices invite students to help develop assessment strategies, both formative and summative. Best assessment practice understands that students need multiple opportunities to provide feedback to and receive feedback from other learners. (2, 4, 5)

Best assessment practice helps students learn to examine and evaluate their own writing and how it functions and moves outside of specifically defined writing courses. These practices help students set individualized goals and encourage critical reflection by student writers on their own writing processes and performances. (4, 5)

Best assessment practice generates data which is shared with faculty and administrators in the program so that assessment results may be used to make changes in practice. These practices make use of assessment data to provide opportunities for reflection, professional development, and for the exchange of information about student performance and institutional or programmatic expectations. (1, 6)

Considerations for Labor

Best assessment practice is undertaken in response to local goals and the local community of educators who guide the design and implementation of the assessment process. These practices actively seek feedback on assessment design and from the full range of faculty who will be impacted by or involved with the assessment process. Best assessment practice values individual writing programs, institutions, or consortiums as communities of interpreters whose knowledge of context and purpose is integral to assessment. (1, 6)

Best assessment practice acknowledges how labor practices determine assessment implementation. It acknowledges the ways teachers’ institutional labor practices vary widely and responds to local labor demands that set realistic and humane expectations for equitable summative and formative feedback. (4, 6)

Best assessment practice acknowledges the labor of research and the ways local conditions affect opportunities for staying abreast of the field. In these practices, opportunities for professional development based on assessment data are made accessible and meaningful to the full range of faculty teaching in the local context. (3)

Best assessment practice uses multiple measures to ensure successful formative and summative assessment appropriate to program expectation and considers competing tensions such as teaching load, class size, and programmatic learning outcomes when determining those measures. (2, 6)

Best assessment practice provides faculty with financial, technical, and practical support in implementing comprehensive assessment measures and acknowledges the ways local contexts influence assessment decisions. (5, 6)

Contexts for Writing Assessment

Ethical assessment at all levels and in all settings is context specific and labor intensive. Participants working toward an ethical culture of assessment must critically consider the conditions of labor, as well as expectations for class size, participation in programmatic assessment (especially for contingent faculty members), and professional development related to assessment. In addition, these activities and expectations should inform all discussions of workload for assessment participants to ensure that the labor of assessment is appropriately recognized and, where appropriate, compensated.

Ethical assessment does not only consider the immediate practice of faculty engaging in classroom, programmatic, or institutional assessment, but it also builds on the assessment practices students have experienced in the past. Ethical assessment considers how it will coincide with other assessment practices students encounter at our institutions and keeps in sight the assessment experiences students are likely to experience in the future. A deliberately designed culture of assessment aligns classroom learning goals with larger programmatic and institutional learning goals and aligns assessment practices accordingly. It involves teachers, administrators, students, and community stakeholders designing assessments grounded in classroom and program contexts, and it includes feeding assessment data back to those involved so that assessment results may be used to make changes in practice. Ethical assessment also protects the data and identities of participants. Finally, ethical assessment practices involve asking difficult questions about the values and missions of an assignment, a course, or a program and whether or not assessments promote or possibly inhibit equity among participants.

Admissions, Placement, and Proficiency

Admissions, placement, and proficiency-based assessment practices are high-stakes processes with a history of exclusion and academic gatekeeping. Educational institutions and programs should recognize the history of these types of measures in privileging some students and penalizing others as it relates to their distinctive institutional and programmatic missions. They should then use that historical knowledge to inform the development of assessment measures that serve local needs and contexts. Assessments should be designed and implemented to support student progress and success. With placement in particular, institutions should be mindful of the financial burden and persistence issues that increase in proportion to the number of developmental credit hours students are asked to complete based on assessments.

Whether for admissions, placement, or proficiency, recommended practices for any assessment that seeks to directly measure students’ writing abilities involve, but are not limited to, the following concerns:

Writing tasks and assessment criteria should be informed and motivated by the goals of the institution, the program, the curriculum, and the student communities that the program serves. (1, 2)
Writing products should be measured against a clearly defined set of criteria developed in conversation with instructors of record to ensure the criteria align with the goals of the program and/or the differences between the courses into which students might be placed. (1, 2)
Instructors of record should serve as scorers or should be regularly invited to provide feedback on whether existing assessment models are accurate, appropriate, and ethical. (4, 6)
Assessments should consist of multiple writing tasks that allow students to engage in various stages of their writing processes. (4, 5)
Assessment processes should include student input, whether in the form of a reflective component of the assessment or through guided self-placement measures. (5)
Students should have the opportunity to question and appeal assessment decisions. (5, 6)
Writing tasks and assessment criteria should be revisited regularly and updated to reflect the evolving goals of the program or curriculum. (1, 3)

Classroom Assessment

Classroom assessment processes typically involve summative and formative assessment of individually and collaboratively authored projects in both text-based and multimedia formats. Assessments in the classroom usually involve evaluations and judgments of student work. Those judgments have too often been tied to how well students perform standard edited American English (SEAE) to the exclusion of other concerns. Instead, classroom assessments should focus on acknowledging that students enter the classroom with varied language practices, abilities, and knowledges, and these enrich the classroom and create more democratic classroom spaces. Classroom assessments should reinforce and reflect the goals of individual and collaborative projects. Additionally, classroom assessment might work toward centering labor-based efforts students put forth when composing for multiple scenarios and purposes. Each of the six foundational principles of assessment is key to ensuring ethical assessment of student writing in a classroom context.

Recommended practices in classroom assessment involve, but are not limited to, the following:

Clear communications related to the purposes of assessment for each project (1, 2)
Assessment/feedback that promote and do not inhibit opportunities for revision, risk-taking, and play (4, 5)
Assessment methodologies grounded in the latest research (3)
Practices designed to benefit the health and welfare of all participants by respecting the labor of instructors and students (6)
Occasions to illustrate a range of rhetorical skills and literacies (3, 4)
Attention to the value of language diversity and rejection of evaluations of language based on a single standard (5)
Efforts to demystify writing, composing, and languaging processes (3, 4)
Opportunities for self-assessment, informed goal setting, and growth (5, 6)
Input from the classroom community on classroom assessment processes (5, 6)

Program Assessment

Assessment of writing programs, from first-year composition programs to Writing Across the Curriculum programs, is a critical component of an institution’s culture of assessment. Assessment can focus on the operation of the program, its effectiveness to improve student writing, and how it best supports university goals.

While programmatic assessment might be driven by state or institutional policies, members of writing programs are in the best position to guide decisions about what assessments will best serve that community. Programs and departments should see themselves as communities of professionals whose assessment activities communicate measures of effectiveness to those inside and outside the program.

Writing program assessments and designs are encouraged to adhere to the following recommended practices:

Reflect the goals and mission of the institution and its writing programs. (1)
Draw on multiple methods, quantitative and qualitative, to assess programmatic effectiveness and incorporate blind assessment processes of anonymized writing when possible. (1, 3, 6)
Establish shared assessment criteria for evaluating student performance that are directly linked to course outcomes and student performance indicators. (1, 2)
Occur regularly with attention to institutional context and programmatic need. (3, 6)
Share assessment protocols with faculty teaching in the program and invite faculty to contribute to design and implementation. (4, 5, 6)
Share assessment results with faculty to ensure assessment informs curriculum design and revisions. (1, 2)
Recognize that assessment results influence and reflect accreditation of and financial resources available to programs. (6)
Provide opportunities for assessors to discuss and come to an understanding of outcomes and scoring options. (4, 5)
Consider faculty labor:
- Faculty assessors should be compensated in ways that advantage them in their local contexts whether this involves financial compensation, reassigned time, or recognized service considered for annual review, promotion, and/or merit raises. (6)
- Contingent instructors are vital to programs and, ideally, their expertise should be considered in assessment processes. If, however, participation exceeds what is written into their contracts/labor expectations, appropriate compensation should be awarded. (6)

Conclusion

There is no perfect assessment measure, and best practices in all assessment contexts involve reflections by stakeholders on the effectiveness and ethics of all assessment practices. Assessments that involve timed tests, rely solely on machine scoring, or primarily judge writing based on prescriptive grammar and mechanics offer a very limited view of student writing ability and have a history of disproportionately penalizing students from marginalized populations. Ethical assessment practices provide opportunities to identify equity gaps in writing programs and classrooms and to use disaggregated data to make informed decisions about increasing educational opportunities for students.

Individual faculty and larger programs should carefully review their use of these assessment methods and critically weigh the benefits and ethics of these approaches. Additionally, when designing these assessment processes, programs should carefully consider the labor that will be required at all stages of the process to ensure an adequate base of faculty labor to maintain the program and to ensure that all faculty involved are appropriately compensated for that labor. Ethical assessment is always an ongoing process of negotiating the historical impacts of writing assessment, the need for a clear portrait of what is happening in classrooms and programs, and the concern for the best interests of all assessment participants.

Acknowledgments

This statement was generously revised by the Task Force to Create CCCC Guidelines for College Writing Assessment: Inclusive, Sustainable, and Evidence-Based Practices. The members of this task force include:

Anna Hensley, Co-chair
Joyce Inman, Co-chair
Melvin Beavers
Raquel Corona
Bump Halbritter
Leigh Jonaitis
Liz Tinoco
Rachel Wineinger

This position statement may be printed, copied, and disseminated without permission from NCTE.

Scholarship in Rhetoric, Writing, and Composition: Guidelines for Faculty, Deans, and Chairs

Conference on College Composition and Communication
[March 2018 (replaces the 1987 CCCC “The Range of Scholarship in Composition: A Description for Department Chairs and Deans”)]

The purpose of this statement is to describe the range of scholarly activities in rhetoric, writing, and composition. The audiences for this statement include faculty and administrators who have the responsibility for evaluating this scholarship as part of the recruitment, promotion, and other evaluative activities that occur in colleges and universities; scholars in the field who are explaining their work to nonspecialists; and any others who want to understand the work of scholars in this broadly interdisciplinary field.

What the Field of Rhetoric, Writing, and Composition Includes

As the title of this statement indicates, the work of scholars in the field is described by various interrelated terms, rhetoric, writing, and composition among the most prominent. The interdisciplinary nature of this scholarship may also include or draw from scholarship in institutional and administrative practices; literacy studies; the scholarship of teaching and learning; communication; print and digital media; technical communication; second language studies/English as a Second Language; linguistics; and critical and cultural studies, among many others. Scholars working in rhetoric, writing, and composition treat the activity of writing, broadly conceived, as their subject. Rhetoric, writing, and composition scholarship addresses how texts are composed, conveyed, and received in a variety of media and for a variety of purposes and audiences, both inside and outside the academy. Scholars investigate writing processes and products in schools and universities, in academic disciplines, in the workplace, in the public arena, in the home, and in digital/virtual environments (see CCCC Promotion and Tenure Guidelines for Work with Technology).

Scholars of rhetoric, writing, and composition understand the power of language and are frequently influenced by their understanding to ask questions about how theories and practices function to support inclusivity or to work against it. The power of language can give people voice, but it can also silence people. Language can be inclusive, but it can also exclude. It can break or sustain traditional stereotypes, biases, hostilities. Scholarship in rhetoric, writing, and composition often examines the power of language through rhetorical, theoretical, and empirical investigations.

Scholarship in rhetoric, writing, and composition may not foreground diversity and inclusion, but it is typically informed by the recognition of the power of language. The scholarship that led to the adoption of the CCCC Position Statement titled Students’ Right to Their Own Language, that led Mina Shaughnessy to bring the diversity of her open enrollment students to our attention in Errors and Expectations, and that explains why David Bartholomae’s “Inventing the University” remains powerful today is indicative of our field’s long commitment to understanding the power of language and the language of power. Some scholarship in rhetoric, writing, and composition takes diversity and inclusion as its primary focus, as is the case in the works just named. Other scholarship may use issues of race, gender and gender identification, class, multilinguality, and/or national origin as lenses to consider topics such as assessment, as do the contributors to Asao Inoue and Mya Poe’s book Race and Writing Assessment (Studies in Composition and Rhetoric No. 7, Peter Lang, 2012).

How Rhetoric, Writing, and Composition Scholars Conduct Research

Scholarship in the field includes a wide variety of areas of inquiry, methods, and publication genres/media, including but not limited to historical or theoretical research, pedagogical studies, assessment of writing pedagogies and programs, rhetorical analysis of traditional and new media texts, linguistic analyses, studies of community and civic literacies, multimodal and digital research, and other creative and narrative genres. Scholarship may be text- or media-focused, using methods common to the humanities. It may also be focused on teaching and learning in educational settings, or on professional composing practices, using observational and experimental methods common to the social and behavioral sciences. Such studies require approval from Institutional Review Boards to ensure safe and ethical interactions with human participants, the students or members of specific organizations being studied (see CCCC Guidelines for the Ethical Conduct of Research in Composition Studies). Published scholarship often combines the development or application of theory with empirical research. While some scholarship in rhetoric, writing, and composition takes as its primary focus texts written by other scholars, or literary texts created by novelists, poets, and playwrights, a substantial amount of scholarship in the field examines texts (and images and rhetorical acts of all kinds) composed by students and/or writers in “ordinary” settings.

The omnipresence of writing both within and beyond educational settings opens multiple sites of inquiry for scholars in rhetoric, writing, and composition, and makes the boundaries between those areas of inquiry somewhat porous. One subset of scholarship involves itself primarily in the ways writing instruction is delivered in varied settings, from traditional classrooms to workplaces and sites of social need (prisons, workforce development, community literacy centers, etc.). It acknowledges that such sites vary by the circumstances and backgrounds of learners, attending, for example, to specific needs that arise in four-year, two-year, and online institutions, as well as institutions that focus on traditionally underserved populations. It also attends to the differences in the delivery of writing instruction in subject-specific writing (as with WAC/WID programs), in tutoring/consulting sessions, for L2 learners, and in online environments—all of which also include a wide range of instructor preparation and professional development as well as the work of writing program administration in developing curricula and preparing teachers. And while research on these sites of pedagogy attends to issues of instructional processes, other areas of research focus on the writing products that emerge from those sites, providing occasions for rhetorical analysis, studies of discursive differences, and studies of impact on both the work done at those sites and the producers of those texts. Moreover, scholarship in the field often turns its attention to issues of application, posing such questions as “What are the implications of this research for the classroom and/or community?” and to issues of outreach, asking, “What does this research suggest for developing literacies beyond institutional walls?”

Scholars in rhetoric, writing, and composition often conduct and publish work collaboratively, and often eschew traditional notions of “first author,” both because the field typically regards collaborative work as equal partnerships and because the order of names may not indicate contribution levels.

Where Rhetoric, Writing, and Composition Scholars Are Located in Institutions

Because of the wide range of scholarly, teaching, and administrative situations in which scholars in rhetoric, writing, and composition act, they may hold positions in a variety of institutional departments and programs. Traditionally, rhetoric, writing, and composition faculty have held tenured faculty positions in Departments of English, but at many institutions, rhetoric, writing, and composition resides in a department of its own. At other universities, rhetoric, writing, and composition scholars may hold positions in institution-wide writing centers or Writing Across the Curriculum programs, frequently with a tenure home in an academic department. Rhetoric, writing, and composition scholars may hold tenure in Departments of Technical Communication, and because of the close relationship between writing and second language studies, some rhetoric, writing, and composition scholars are members of Departments of Applied Linguistics or Second Language Studies or Communication. Some may hold appointments outside of traditional departments, as may be the case of a faculty member directing a professional writing program located in a college of business. Rhetoric, writing, and composition scholars often hold joint appointments in more than one administrative unit.

How Writing Program Administration and Scholarship in Rhetoric, Writing, and Composition Are Linked

The boundaries between scholarship, teaching, and service are quite porous for faculty members working in rhetoric, writing, and composition. This is because much of what we study is about pedagogy and practice: how writing is taught and learned in courses, programs, and extracurricular sites. This is also because many rhetoric, writing, and composition scholars administer (and study) writing programs of various kinds, including but not limited to first-year writing programs, writing centers, professional writing programs, writing majors, and Writing Across the Curriculum/Writing in the Disciplines initiatives. There are doctoral-level courses in writing program administration now offered across the country and increasing attention paid to the ways that programmatic work can be considered scholarship.

This linkage between our administrative work and our scholarship and teaching is so common and, for many, so central that the Council of Writing Program Administrators issued a statement in 1998 titled “Evaluating the Intellectual Work of Writing Administration”. This statement recognizes that much administrative work conducted by writing scholars can and should be considered scholarship, not just service. However, for that to be the case, it can “neither derive from nor produce simplistic products or services” and must instead “draw upon historical and contemporary knowledge, and . . . contribute to the formation of new knowledge and improved decision making.” This statement contends that “writing program administration may be considered intellectual work when it meets two tests. First, it needs to advance knowledge—its production, clarification, connection, reinterpretation, or application. Second, it results in products or activities that can be evaluated by others.” The statement notes five areas of administrative work that might meet these two tests: program creation, curricular design, faculty development, program assessment and evaluation, and program-related textual production. Any of these “products” or activities might be considered scholarship if they generate, clarify, connect, reinterpret, or apply knowledge based on research, theory, and sound pedagogical practice; require disciplinary knowledge available only to an expert trained in or conversant with a particular field; require highly developed analytical or problem-solving skills derived from specific expertise, training, or research; and result in products or activities that can be evaluated by peers. The statement further suggests criteria for evaluating this work: is it innovative, does it improve/refine, can it be/is it disseminated, and does it produce empirical results?

How Scholarship in Rhetoric, Writing, and Composition Is Made Public

The work of rhetoric and composition teachers and researchers appears in professional and popular print and online publications, single- or coauthored monographs, edited collections, and textbooks. We are often called on to respond to language-related issues (e.g., the English-only movement, gendered and racialized expression, the teaching of grammar, the use of inclusive language) by way of editorials, radio and news interviews, and panels. Perhaps more than any of our colleagues, we are the public face of English studies (see CCCC Statement on Community-Engaged Projects in Rhetoric and Composition). Outlets for the publication of scholarship in rhetoric, writing, and composition include traditional university presses, private academic presses, traditional print journals, “born digital” online journals, and open access, peer-reviewed publications. Because, as mentioned above, innovative textbooks are a common product of scholarship in rhetoric, writing, and composition, the writing of textbooks should be considered evidence of the scholarship of teaching and learning. As is the case in all disciplines, peer review is standard practice in the scholarly publishing of books, essay collections, journal articles, and textbooks in rhetoric, writing, and composition.

This position statement may be printed, copied, and disseminated without permission from NCTE.

Part Two: What Teachers Can Learn about Fair Use in Remix Writing from the US Copyright Office

This is the second and last installment in a two part series on the 2010 Digital Millennium Copyright Act exemptions. See the “Part One: The New DMCA Exemption for College Teachers and Students” link at the bottom of this page for the first installment.

As mentioned in Part One of this series, on July 26, 2010, the Librarian of Congress issued new exemptions to the anti-circumvention provisions of the DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) section 1201(a)(1), USC Title 17 pursuant to the statutorily authorized tri-annual rulemaking process. Of interest to college and university composition teachers and students, the new exemptions permit the circumvention of CSS (Content Scrambling System) encrypted DVDs in limited circumstances, for purposes of comment and criticism. Every three years these exemptions are issued pursuant to a process that involves public hearings followed by an elaborate and formal Recommendation written by the US Register of Copyrights to the Librarian of Congress. In her June 11, 2010, 262 page Recommendation, Mary Beth Peters, the current US Register of Copyrights, provides some concrete examples of remixes that likely are — or are not — “Fair Use.” These examples can be used as teaching tools for college/university instructors.

Under the doctrine of Fair Use, if a new work transforms an older copyrighted work, the new work could be within the Fair Use protections of Section 107, Title 17: U.S. copyright law. In her Recommendation, Peters suggests that noncommercial videos – fanfiction such as Luminosity’s Women’s Work and the remix political video by ParkRidge47 (ParkRidge47’s video is a political parody of a 1984 Apple Macintosh Commercial), might be transformative enough to be Fair Use, especially because only small, minutes-long portions were used in relation to entire 120 minute movies, or because the remixed video was “used for a new and different purpose from the original” (Recommendation, 2010, p. 51; Also I acknowledge some of the ideas in this month’s report derive from an in process chapter I’m working on with co-author Danielle Nicole DeVoss).

In contrast, Peters points out that some video remixes might not be Fair Uses, especially when they use “multiple clips from the same motion picture” and “larger percentages” of a single motion picture (Recommendation, 2010, p. 51). Luminosity’s Vogue/300 is one such remix described by Peters as “showing an extensive montage of scenes from the movie 300 mixed with Madonna’s sound recording, Vogue” (p. 51, footnote 187). Therefore, this remix probably isn’t making Fair Use of the materials it incorporates.

These concrete examples provided by Peters can also serve as teaching tools in the university/college writing classroom. After a brief discussion about Fair Use and the “Four Factor” Analysis (See Section 107), students can then be show the videos linked above, and asked to deliberate on which video is making Fair Use of others’ materials, and which isn’t. Their discussion can then be informed by Peters’ written Recommendation. These kinds of conversations can help students think critically about their own remix-writing practices in the context of copyright. For this reason – although Peters’ Recommendation is a bit dense and long for the average lay reader – it does contain some very useful information that when given in context, can provide an engaging teaching tool permitting students to gain knowledge about how Fair Use works in-action.

Respectfully Submitted 21 Feb. 2011,

Martine Courant Rife, JD, PhD
Junior Chair, CCCC IP Caucus
Lansing Community College
Lansing, Michigan
martinerife@gmail.com

Intellectual Property Reports Main Page

Part One: The New DMCA Exemption for College Teachers and Students

Submitted by Martine Courant Rife, JD, PhD

Junior Chair of the CCCC IP Caucus

Lansing Community College

martinerife@gmail.com

Part One of a Two Part Installment (the next installment in late 2010 will discuss what we can learn about fair use in remix writing from the Register of Copyrights)

As many have heard by now, on July 26, 2010, the Librarian of Congress issued new exemptions to the anti-circumvention provisions of the DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) section 1201(a)(1), USC Title 17 pursuant to the statutorily authorized tri-annual rulemaking process. Of interest to college and university composition teachers and students, the new exemptions permit the circumvention of CSS (Content Scrambling System) encrypted DVDs in limited circumstances, for purposes of comment and criticism. The exemptions favorably expanded toward the interests of educators and other remix writers, such as noncommercial video makers (“vidders”) and documentary filmmakers. In fact, the new exemptions are nothing short of a victory for the college and university crowd. I participated in the most recent Washington, D.C. hearings held at the Library of Congress on May 6 and 7, 2009, and I’m also a member of the CCCC Intellectual Property (IP) Caucus, so I thought I’d spend a few minutes discussing the exemptions in this month’s IP Report.

The tri-annual rulemaking hearings are a bright light in the copyright debate – serving as a rare open space where the educational community can voice its concerns over shrinking fair use protections and increased copyright policing and enforcement. Under the DMCA, every three years the Librarian of Congress, Register of Copyrights, and the Assistant Secretary for Communications and Information of the Department of Commerce follow certain procedures to decide what persons/users of copyrighted work “are, or are likely to be . . . adversely affected by the [anti-circumvention] prohibition” of the DMCA. Basically, the problem with the 1998 enacted DMCA is that notwithstanding our fair use protections under Section 107, the DMCA makes it illegal to circumvent technological protections in order to gain access to a work, like a CSS encrypted DVD movie. But, since CSS also prevents the ability to copy (even though the DMCA does not prohibit our right to copy under Section 107), circumventing the CSS in order to make copies of bits and pieces of a larger work, automatically circumvents CSS’s access protection. Because of the harshness of the DMCA’s anti-circumvention provisions, exemptions are granted every three years upon the showing of sufficient evidence by affected parties, like college teachers and students.

Brief History

The rulemaking proceedings occurred previously in 2000, 2003, and 2006. The Copyright Office maintains the most useful and excellent website as a DMCA resource. This website maintains just about all of the filed documents as well as audio and text transcripts of all hearings.

The rulemaking process includes proposing initial classes of works to be exempted, submitting comments and responses to comments, submitting requests to testify, testifying, and participating in the post-hearing question and answer period. The hearings are open to any person or organization that wishes to participate as long as they follow posted procedures. In 2009, 37 witnesses testified on 21 proposed classes of works (“Recommendation”, p. 20, 2010). I became involved in the hearings as a witness, and participated in the intense and extended post-hearing question and answer period. On June 19 and 22, 2009 the Copyright Office sent out the first question set, and on August 21, 2009 it sent out the second question set. My response to the first question and the joint statement I signed are posted online, as is my response to the second question and the additional joint statement I signed. While the 2010 exemptions cover six areas, I’m just discussing the exemption I contributed to – that exemption focused on colleges and universities, and permitting educational/noncommercial uses of DVD clips for remix writing.

What Changed?

Along with other stakeholders, I requested the exemption achieved in 2006 by University of Pennsylvania film studies Prof. Pete DeCherney, be continued and expanded to include a broader population of teachers as well as students. The 2006 exemption reads:

Audiovisual works included in the educational library of a college or university’s film or media studies department, when circumvention is accomplished for the purpose of making compilations of portions of those works for educational use in the classroom by media studies or film professors. (http://www.copyright.gov/1201/2006/index.html)

And the new 2010 exemption language issued is:

(1) Motion pictures on DVDs that are lawfully made and acquired and that are protected by the Content Scrambling System when circumvention is accomplished solely in order to accomplish the incorporation of short portions of motion pictures into new works for the purpose of criticism or comment, and where the person engaging in circumvention believes and has reasonable grounds for believing that circumvention is necessary to fulfill the purpose of the use in the following instances:

(i) Educational uses by college and university professors and by college and university film and media studies students;
(ii) Documentary filmmaking;
(iii) Noncommercial videos. (http://www.copyright.gov/1201/ )

This new expanded exemption reflects a huge leap moving forward from 2006, and addresses broader needs of college-level stakeholders – including documentary filmmakers and vidders.

What Does it Mean?

The new exemption limits permission to circumvent specifically to motion pictures on DVDs rather than the broader category of audiovisual works. During the DC hearings, evidence offered focused almost exclusively on motion pictures on DVDs. I, for example, showed a student created montage (one collected during my 2007 research on copyright and chilled speech) – made by taking clips from numerous popular movies – as an example of a cultural critique that could not exist but for the student being willing to violate the DMCA in order to make what was clearly a fair use of the movies. The reason I showed this montage at the hearings was because, as I told the copyright panel, a student shouldn’t have to violate the law in order to critique popular movies in the format in which those movies were presented to the public. (My submitted presentation summary is available here). The new exemption is further broadened to remove the limitation that only works in libraries can be circumvented.

The new exemption now includes all college and university teachers, plus college-level “film and media studies students.” But, any use that isn’t covered by this should be covered by the noncommercial video or documentary filmmaker exemption. The Recommendation affirms that in order to be a documentary filmmaker, one need not belong to a professional organization or be enrolled in a class. Instead, the Recommendation states that the best way to define if someone is in fact a documentary filmmaker, is “to ask whether that person is making a documentary film” (p. 73). The Recommendation affirms “noncommercial videos that comment on motion pictures can be made by anyone; fair use does not depend upon the credentials of the person engaging in a noninfringing act” (p. 73). As long as a person falls into one of the three categories (1. Educational uses by college and university professors and by college and university film and media studies students; 2. Documentary filmmaking; and 3. Noncommercial video making), the person who wishes to circumvent then needs ensure they are within the other requirements provided.

According to the exemption, the following requirements must be met for all circumventors:

The purpose of the circumvention must be to take only “short portions of motion pictures.”
These short portions must be intended to be incorporated “into new works.”
The new works must exist “for the purpose of criticism or comment.”
And the circumvention must be necessary. If there are other less egregious means to accomplish the taking of short portions for new works, a potential circumventor should use those. The language states that the person who is thinking of circumventing must believe or have “reasonable grounds for believing that circumvention is necessary to fulfill the purpose of the use.”

The DVD circumvented must also be “lawfully made and acquired.” So if someone acquired a pirated DVD, it would not be acceptable under the exemption to circumvent because a pirated DVD is not “lawfully made.” If someone steals a DVD – that too would not be covered because it is not “lawfully acquired.”

Don’t Traffic the Tools Primarily Designed to Circumvent Technological Measures Meant to Control Access

As we all acknowledged at the hearings, it is still illegal to traffic any tool “primarily designed or produced for the purpose of circumventing a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title” (1201[a][2]). I’ve already been asked, as a college teacher, is it “trafficking” to provide a link to a tool that is meant for circumvention? At the same time, several tools have been suggested to me for use.

This area is really uncharted territory. As a writing teacher, I am not going to develop, invent, or market a tool whose primary purpose is to circumvent the CSS on DVDs. Nor am I going to download a tool and then provide it to students. I won’t link to a tool either – if it is a tool whose primary function is to hack the CSS on DVDs. Instead, as I work through using this exemption in teaching, I will raise these issues in class discussion. As a matter of pedagogy, I’d consider it imperative students know this exemption was hard won, and is only in place for another two years unless we argue for its continuance. So I think giving students a context is really important. From my experience, most college-age students are familiar with these tools and at the hearings, tools were listed that are well known and widely available for free download.

During the hearings most of the educational/noncommercial stakeholders agreed the main type of work we need the ability to circumvent is CSS encrypted DVDs. Of course, at the 2012 hearings, some might request a broader exemption, but in order to do so they will need empirical evidence showing how they are adversely affected otherwise. Further, for those who are celebrating this new exemption, like me, we need to be prepared to show this exemption actually has been useful in order to demonstrate our continued need for the exemption beyond 2012. Because of this, I sincerely hope that those of us connected to CCCC can fully use this exemption and gather examples and stories of how we have benefited from it.

Intellectual Property Reports Main Page

Top Intellectual Property Developments of 2014

Introduction to the 2014 Annual

by Clancy Ratliff

This issue marks ten years since the Intellectual Property Caucus and Intellectual Property Committee started publishing the CCCC-IP Annual. I’m proud to say that it has steadily grown since the first issue. While I do not have data about our readership, I can say that the number of articles has increased over time:

2005: three articles
2006: four articles
2007: six articles
2008: four articles
2009: nine articles
2010: nine articles
2011: six articles
2012: seven articles
2013: seven articles
2014 – this year’s issue: ten articles

We have also made progress as a field in our thinking about authorship, copyright, and intellectual property, particularly in the area of open access. At the March 2015 meeting of the CCCC-IP Caucus, Heather Joseph, Executive Director of SPARC (the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition), spoke to us about several developments in open access research and publishing. She mentioned the Creative Commons Attribution license (CC-BY) as the most progressive standard of open access, allowing not only copying and distribution of published research, but the uses now possible with new research methods enabled by software code, such as data visualization and topic modeling. For fully open access, as well as for accessibility (for example, creating audio recordings of the CCCC-IP Annual for people with particular disabilities) derivative works should be allowed. Since 2007, we have used the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial Use-No Derivative Works license, which is really only one step up from fair use: readers simply had permission to copy and distribute the full CCCC-IP Annual. We have now decided, though, to adopt a CC-BY license.

The Caucus and the Committee continue to work to keep the CCCC membership informed about intellectual property issues that work in favor of, or against, the interests of students and teachers, and readers and writers more generally. We recently applied for and received status as a CCCC Standing Group, and at the 2014 CCCC, we presented a panel about the history of the Caucus and our accomplishments. Many, many articles, book chapters, books, and special issues of journals have come out of Caucus meetings, as well as campus-specific advocacy. However, we still have work to do on several fronts, both legal and pedagogical. One of particular interest to me is plagiarism detection services, which I want to re-frame, as we go into the second half of 2015, as automated plagiarism detection. The Caucus proposed a CCCC resolution about the use of plagiarism detection services, which was passed in 2013:

Whereas CCCC does not endorse PDSs;

Whereas plagiarism detection services can compromise academic integrity by potentially undermining students’ agency as writers, treating all students as always already plagiarists, creating a hostile learning environment, shifting the responsibility of identifying and interpreting source misuse from teachers to technology, and compelling students to agree to licensing agreements that threaten their privacy and rights to their own intellectual property;

Whereas plagiarism detection services potentially negatively change the role of the writing teacher; construct ill-conceived notions of originality and writing; disavow the complexities of writing in and with networked, digital technologies; and treat students as non-writers; and

Whereas composition teacher-scholars can intervene and combat the potential negative influences of PDSs by educating colleagues about the realities of plagiarism and the troubling outcomes of using PDSs; advocating actively against the adoption of such services; modeling and sharing ideas for productive writing pedagogy; and conducting research into alternative pedagogical strategies to address plagiarism, including honor codes and process pedagogy;

BE IT THEREFORE RESOLVED that the Conference on College Composition and Communication commends institutions who offer sound pedagogical alternatives to the use of PDSs and encourages institutions who use PDSs to implement practices that are in the best interest of their students, including notifying students at the beginning of the term that the service will be used; providing students a non-coercive and convenient opt-out process; and inviting students to submit drafts to the service before turning in final text.

While the above resolution represents what many of us agree to be the case about plagiarism detection services, of which Turnitin is the main PDS provider, there is also this grim but correct observation from Rebecca Moore Howard, posted on the Writing Program Administration listserv (emphasis in original):

Turnitin has become like abortion and the death penalty: A topic on which people are making decisions based on deeply held beliefs inaccessible to logos. I visit faculties at several campuses every year, and in each audience are instructors who cannot imagine teaching without Turnitin. I am in a post-debate state with such people, unwilling any longer to search for the common ground on which we will exchange principles and consider possibilities, at the end of which these folks will return to Mother Turnitin against all reason. I just tell folks why I don’t use it, and turn to another topic. No one has ever said to me, “You know, I thought about what you said, and I changed my practice.” No one.

IIn tandem with the discourse about Turnitin is the discourse about the Common Core State Standards Initiative and its assessments of writing, which according to some reports are set to use AES, or Automated Essay Scoring. Teachers and administrators in K-12 and higher education, as well as students and parents, have expressed serious concerns about this plan. I see an opportunity to re-frame plagiarism detection services in order to show what those of us studying intellectual property and composition have understood for years: that AES and PDS are basically the same – artificial reading that replaces quality instruction and contextualized feedback on student writing. Hence I propose automated plagiarism detection. Also, because I included image macros (known more commonly as memes, though these are only one kind of meme) in the introduction of last year’s CCCC-IP Annual, I will end with these two image macros I created for the occasion. Though facetious, they are yet a potent way to communicate a point.

Table of Contents
1	Introduction to the 2014 CCCC-IP Annual Clancy Ratliff
5	Plagiarism and PTSD: The Case of Senator John Walsh’s Plagiarized Paper Steven Engel, Kerry Howell, Jacklene Johnson, and Jessica McGinnis
11	What We Can Learn from Two Plagiarism Accusations in 2014: Slavoj Žižek’s and Nic Pizzolatto’s Summer Scandals Wendy Warren Austin
18	3D Printing and Patent Theft: New Challenges to the Creative Commons Chet Breaux
21	Keep on Keeping On: Georgia State Fair Use Case Faces a New Metric for Assessing Fair Use Jeffrey R. Galin
30	Open Data, Environmental Conservation, and the Digital Humanities: Mapping the Mangroves Amy D. Propen
34	Another Piece in the Open-Access Puzzle: The California Taxpayer Access to Publicly Funded Research Act (AB609) Karen Lunsford
38	Will Taylor Swift and Spotify Ever Get Back Together? Laurie Cubbison
42	The Case of the Missing Copyright: Sherlock Holmes and the Acerbic Judge Kim Dian Gainer
52	How the Law Can Cost Composition Instructors a Lot of Money, and What You Can Do About It: The EFF’s White Paper on Civil Penalties for Copyright Infringement Mike Edwards
55	Review: The Internet’s Own Boy: The Story of Aaron Swartz (2014) Traci A. Zimmerman
60	Contributors

Data Privacy Day 2010 Celebrated January 28

By Martine Courant Rife, Lansing Community College, martinerife@gmail.com

Thursday January 28 marked the official date of “Data Privacy Day 2010,” a day which provides an opportunity to reflect with students how composing and/or utilizing the affordances of networked spaces not only provides unprecedented access to information, but also challenges the preservation of privacy about individuals’ data – data that can range from shopping habits to bank account information. According to http://dataprivacyday2010.org/ , “Data Privacy Day is an international celebration of the dignity of the individual expressed through personal information.” Institutions and organizations around the globe join in the celebration in order to acknowledge the importance of maintaining some privacy in our use of technologies such as mobile phones, social networking sites, blogs, online banking, and the internet in general. Libraries, educational institutions, and various businesses sponsored and/or were involved in the celebration. For example, The Center for Internet & Society at Stanford University held a roundtable on the topic of “Money and Privacy,” where experts discussed the connections between privacy and company finances.

According to http://dataprivacyday2010.org/about/ , Data Privacy Day 2010 is organized through Privacy.org, “a nonprofit think tank and research organization dedicated to facilitating the role of consumer privacy and data protection.” A wealth of information about Privacy.org is available on its website, http://theprivacyprojects.org/. The organization conducts academic research as well as outreach and collaboration in order to find the balance and complexities in between our need for information and our need for privacy.

For writing teachers, Data Privacy Day may give us reason to pause and take time to reflect on the ways in which we might protect, and teach students to protect, their/our identities, histories, associations, and purchases, in and through digitally enhanced spaces. Along this line, I offer a sample activity that I am having beginning level college students engage in this week, in an online writing class on “Authorship in the Digital Age.” This Learning Module is an activity that offers a way to both increase students’ awareness of digital privacy issues, while also encouraging students to practice critical reading, writing, research and evaluation skills, as well as collaboration skills if they choose to work in a team. Here is the assignment:

Learning Module: Privacy Statements on the Web

Goal: To help you see how some of the issues raised in our readings and lectures might apply in real-world contexts. To help you understand how others might use your data. To help you think of ideas in the event you were to craft a privacy statement for your own or others’ websites/spaces.

Teams: You may complete this assignment as a single person, or you can complete it in a team of up to three people. If you complete this as a team, please be sure to include all parties’ names in the final document. If completed as a team, just post a single document.

Overview: For this module, I want you to explore privacy statements. Privacy statements or privacy terms are usually short statements made by companies or organizations, outlining their policies and approaches to maintaining or protecting the privacy of their users. Here are a few examples:

[In this area the teacher posts links to several company privacy statements]

Task #1: Review the privacy statements provided above. Get a sense of what they contain.

Task #2: Select a privacy statement from a company that interests you, or you can also use one of the privacy statements linked above. NOTE: Privacy statements are often hidden in the webpage – often several links in from the homepage, and often linked at the bottom of the webpage.

Task #3: Based on what you know so far, evaluate the privacy statement that you have selected. Since you do have points of comparison provided above, you might consider:

Is the privacy statement easy to read and navigate?
Is it easy to locate from the company’s homepage? (I find these statements are often hidden, or linked in the lower right hand corner with very small fonts)
Is the privacy statement helpful?
Are there ambiguous statements in the privacy statement? Is there language that is unclear? Give examples.
In your opinion, is the privacy statement well written? Why or why not?
If you were going to recommend improvements, what would you suggest? Why?
Based on your subjective opinion, and compared to what you know about privacy statements, do you find the privacy statement you are evaluating satisfactory? Why or why not?

Task #4: Write up your response and evaluation – try not to exceed 500 words, but provide at least 300 words. You can use any format, or set up your document any way you like as long as I can read it and it is any of these file formats: .doc/.docx/.rtf/.pdf. Be sure to attribute your source(s) – you can use MLA/APA or any other form of citation – all I’m looking for here is an effort to attribute – simple URLs are fine, for example.

Task #5: Upload your document as an attachment in this discussion board by the due date.

RUBRIC:

Did the writer take a thoughtful approach to the assignment?
Is the writing relatively free from errors?
Is the writing well organized?
Is the writing neat in its presentation?
Did the writer follow the requirements of the assignment?
Is the writer’s discussion interesting and original?

For teachers working in traditional brick and mortar classrooms, students could work on this exercise together if computers are available. For those in classrooms without computers, teachers could print off sample corporate/social networking site privacy statements before class and students could evaluate the print versions.

Intellectual Property Reports Main Page

Top Intellectual Property Developments of 2012

Introduction to the 2012 CCCC-IP Annual

This is the eighth volume of the CCCC Intellectual Property Annual, my sixth as editor. I’m excited about this year’s Annual: not only do the contributors offer their usual thoughtful analysis about developments in copyright law, such as Laurie Cubbison’s article about content industries’ use of bots to detect copyright infringement, Juliette Lapeyrouse-Cherry’s insightful application of patent law in a case of “seed piracy” to our notions of authorship and collaboration, and Jeffrey Galin’s article about the Georgia State University case’s implications for fair use and online coursepacks, but they also help us as teachers. James Porter’s article about MOOCs makes me proud to be the editor of an open-access publication and to help distribute this groundbreaking and timely work to a wide audience. Just read it.

The 2012 Annual also features two articles about plagiarism: I can easily imagine assigning Katie Kottemann’s essay about plagiarism and the Romney campaign in a pedagogy seminar or even a first-year writing class. Steven Engel and Chris Gerben’s analysis of the Harvard plagiarism scandal gives us a wonderfully clear explanation of the mixed messages students receive about authorship, collaboration, and plagiarism, which is helpful for any teacher as well.

The Annual ends with an essay by Cory Doctorow memorializing Aaron Swartz, a dynamic copyright activist who took his own life in early January of 2013. As you’ll read, he was embroiled in legal battles resulting from his efforts to make information free to all. His loss has been felt all over the world, prompting articles about him in Rolling Stone, Slate, Salon, The New Yorker, The Los Angeles Times, and other periodicals. We are republishing Doctorow’s post, which he originally wrote for Boing Boing and released into the public domain.

MIT Will Publish All Faculty Articles Free in Online Repository (2009 Decision)

Charlotte Brammer, Samford University

An important development in the open access arena occurred March 18, 2009, when MIT faculty voted unanimously to publish their scholarly articles free in an online repository. The complete policy, including key definitions and FAQs, is available from the university’s library, http://info-libraries.mit.edu/scholarly/faculty-and-researchers/mit-faculty-open-access-policy/.

The policy states:

Each Faculty member grants to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology nonexclusive permission to make available his or her scholarly articles and to exercise the copyright in those articles for the purpose of open dissemination. In legal terms, each Faculty member grants to MIT a nonexclusive, irrevocable, paid-up, worldwide license to exercise any and all rights under copyright relating to each of his or her scholarly articles, in any medium, provided that the articles are not sold for a profit, and to authorize others to do the same. The policy will apply to all scholarly articles written while the person is a member of the Faculty except for any articles completed before the adoption of this policy and any articles for which the Faculty member entered into an incompatible licensing or assignment agreement before the adoption of this policy. The Provost or Provost’s designate will waive application of the policy for a particular article upon written notification by the author, who informs MIT of the reason. (MIT-Open Access Policy)

Similar to policies of other schools, MIT’s policy grants the school “nonexclusive” rights, meaning faculty “retain ownership and complete control of the copyright in [their] writings, subject only to this prior license. [Faculty authors] can exercise [their] copyrights in any way [they] see fit, including transferring them to a publisher ” (MIT-Open Access Policy). As noted in the Library Journal, this open access policy is but the latest attempt of MIT to increase knowledge sharing, much as the university has done with DSpace, which will be the locus for faculty publications, and the “OpenCourseWare (OCW) project, launched in 2001 with the goal of making all MIT course materials available, free of charge, to anyone on the web.”

MIT faculty “is committed to disseminating the fruits of its research and scholarship as widely as possible” (MIT-Open Access Policy). Unlike open access policies of other institutions, namely Harvard’s Arts and Sciences and Law Schools, MIT’s policy involves all faculty at the university, making it the first to do so. Given the university’s position in key technical and scientific fields, this action is significant and may indeed add some peer pressure on other universities to follow suit.

Faculty members can choose to “opt out” of the open access process by submitting their name, publication title and source, as well as reason for opting out. According to the FAQ on MIT’s website, this option was preserved primarily for the protection of junior faculty members who may want (or need) to work with certain publishers that may view the open access policy unfavorably. What was not stated, but seems obvious, is simply that attempting to coerce faculty to comply with an open access policy would be counterproductive and counterintuitive. The idea is to share knowledge and to assist rather than harm faculty.

Knowledge sharing is important for faculty and for institutions of higher education. Faculty are expected to produce knowledge and to publish. Indeed, the “publish or perish” paradigm continues to pervade colleges and universities, perhaps most extensively at R1 institutions. In addition to publishing, however, citations have become increasingly important in terms of earning and demonstrating prestige, yet citations can be limited when article distribution is limited to expensive subscriptions. MIT’s FAQs mention two important findings: (1) “Studies show a very large citation advantage for open access articles, ranging from 45% to over 500%,” and (2) “the 5 largest journal publishers now account for over half of total market revenues, and over the past 15 years, the price of scholarly journals has grown roughly three times as fast as the Consumer Price Index.”

It is easy to see that open access publications that are indexed by broad search engines, such as the very popular Google Scholar, will have many more potential hits and thus readers than those articles that are not indexed by these search engines. Even though many journal publishers now index through these search engines as a marketing tool, potential readers have to pay for access, and thus they often search for other sources that are available via open access. Publishers, therefore, may cry foul as they see threats to profits. Yet, moves toward open access continue.

Scholarly publishing is changing, and open access policies, such as MIT’s, are both pushing for change and reacting against change that has already occurred. As scholarly publishing moves away from small, discipline-specific, professional groups to commercial publishing firms, scholars and universities are developing new ways to share knowledge broadly.

Works Cited

Albanese, Andrew. “Another First, As MIT Faculty Adopts “University-Wide” Open Access Policy. Library Journal. (25 Mar. 2009).

MIT Faculty Open Access Policy. http://info-libraries.mit.edu/scholarly/faculty-and-researchers/mit-faculty-open-access-policy/

Apple App Store Arbitrates the Cellular Wireless Public Sphere, For Now.

Dayna Goldstein, Georgia Southern University

Apple Inc, the producer of the line of wildly popular iProducts including the iPod, iPhone and iPad is impacting the perception of the public sphere through their mediation of copyright and intellectual property as it relates to their “walled garden” cellular wireless internet devices. Why should the members of CCCC care about the line of iProducts? Well for one, there is the over 200 combined occurrences of these products in the Chronicle of Higher Education in the last year.1 Their prevalence in the Chronicle confirms their intimacy with and saturation of academic life. More importantly, the invisible differences between the wired and wireless cellular internets that they reify, compounded by Apples market dominance and reputation make these devices key arbitration points of digital culture and property. In short, the mediation of the internet on these devices is poised to have a substantive impact on how consumers assume the public sphere operates and what rights might eventually prevail on the growing cellular wireless web and beyond.

In order to understand how Apple became the arbiter of a whole class of software in 2009, it is important to understand how the experience of the device feels to the unaware user and the difference between the wired and cellular wireless internets. When a consumer uses an iProduct they may reach one of two internets at a time. They are each binary devices. They devices may be set on the wired internet. The “wired” internet includes wi-fi which is hooked to a wired router at some point by an individual consumer or business. In practical terms, this internet is the unmediated internet available by desktop, laptop or netbook. It is the internet we have at home and at work. The “wired” internet has been “open” for decades. Any user can download any software they want from the wired internet regardless of device. It would be unfathomable, for example, for any wired internet provider like Comcast, America Online, or Roadrunner to limit what you could and could not use on your computer. However, this is just what the so called “Walled Garden” approache of iProducts do. The Apple hardware and software on iProducts block the wired internet from downloading programs. Instead, the cellular “wireless” network, referring to the 3G&Edge networks controlled by AT&T, paired with the Apple hardware allows exclusively for the download of applications (“Apps”) from the Apple App Store. Wireless networks are federally unregulated and do not have to allow for competition in their model (Wireless Telecommunication Bureau). The company that owns the cellular wireless network has discretion over what data may pass. The devices smooth transition from one internet to the other obscures the difference in rules and laws between the two spheres. Apple boasts on their iPhone internet spec page that “whether you’re connecting via Wi-Fi, 3G, or EDGE iPhone always connects you to the fastest network available” (iPhone safari 3G) The important distinctions between the two types of networks remains obscured to the user in practice.

The App Store

The App Store is a division of the iTunes store. The iTunes store made history when on January 6, 2009; Apple announced that it had reached an agreement with major record labels to sell all music on the iTunes Store free of DRM restrictions (Cohen). The landmark agreement meant that the heretofore problematic Fairplay™ DRM system was removed from the iTunes music store. (Movies and television shows are still encrypted with Fairplay™.) This tremendous concession by the music industry was spurred on by the oncoming App store, which began January 10th, 2009 to coincide with the launch of the iPhone 3G the next day. The music industry was understandably displeased by this circumstance, but eventually conceded that the loss of market share assured by not going with Apple and their loyal constituency of iProduct users would be intolerable.

However, music is not software. Musicians have long belonged to a label to distribute their music. It is only recently that more musical artists are publishing and profiting independently from their music. By contrast, the software industry has had few, if any, successful model of software publishing. The distribution patterns in the software industry have developed as they have because there was nothing between the software developers and the clients. The Apple App store changes that model (Betteridge). This has left Apple as the heir apparent to a whole class of copyright and intellectual property decisions in 2009.

I will review two recent events in this piece. The first event is the story of Google Voice. It illustrates the closed nature of the new wireless internet model and recent nudges toward opening it. The Next Bus Information System/Muni story which follows illustrates the type of intellectual property issues that may occur in this closed, cellular wireless model and the relevance of these decisions for those of us who teach writing and communication in the public sphere.

Google Voice

Google Voice is a digital switching station for landlines and cell lines with a web friendly interface. With Google Voice users “can access [their] voicemail online, read automatic transcriptions of [their] voicemail, create personalized greetings based on who is calling, make cheap international calls, and more”, claims Google Voice about their service on their about page. Google Voice, like many things from Google labs, has deep roots in Silicon Valley. In 2005 a company called Grand Central had started among industry insiders who had huge bandwidth at their disposal. They noted a rising cost in cell phone packages (before the phone itself became the object of decision instead of the plans) and wanted to develop inexpensive web-based call technology. Google bought Grand Central in July of 2007. In March, 2009, after some down time and quiet revamping, the service was much improved and rereleased under the name Google Voice (Malik).

By July, 2009 several apps using or extending the services of Google Voice including GV Dialer, GV Mobile, and Voice Dialer were already in the Apple App store. According to Sean Kovacks, Google had been working with the permission, approval and utmost courtesy of an Apple Senior Marketing Vice President, Phil Schiller (@seankovacks). On July 27th, the above mentioned Google Voice apps were pulled from the Apple App store and another Google Voice app supposedly rejected (Kinkaid). Spurred on by this decision, Google and many other activists quickly brought this matter to the FCC. Merely four days later, July 31st, 2009, the Wireless Telecommunications Bureau made an official inquiry into Apple Policy (Schlichting). The FCC asked six questions. The questions focused on the rejection of Google Voice, AT&T’s part in that decision, and the App Stores general inclusion and exclusions policies. The FCC also made a point of referencing an earlier charge to the closed, wireless model made by Skype (Ad Hoc Public Interest Spectrum Coalition) in the letter to Apple. Industry insiders read this move by the FCC as an attempt to open the App Store model to the same type of competition available on the wired internet. On Augusts 1st, 2009 Apple responded to the FCC largely claiming that they hadn’t made any decisions about Google Voice and that AT&T had no undue influence in the decisions to remove the Google Voice related applications (Apple Answers). To put it tactfully, Apple’s response letter to the FCC reads as a stall tactic and largely takes the position that they have no position.

In January of 2010, Wired Magazine announced that Google Voice released a web version of Goggle Voice that is accessible on any HTML5 platform, which includes the iPhone wired web interface (Buskirk). The article goes on to smartly suggest that because of the bookmarking feature, the cloud version is almost indistinguishable from the version intend to run on the native iPhone OS. Given this approach by Google it is conceivable that we may look back in a few years and see that this is where the tide turned away from the App Store model and to these cloud-based applications. It is equally conceivable, that given Apple’s generally benevolent dictator approach other companies will not feel the need to follow in the HTML5 path that Google Voice blazed. The question ahead is if the Apple App store should act as the moderator of copyright, app distribution, and modification in the future. The next story will discuss one such complicated situation where Apple was the arbiter in the closed, wireless cellular model of the App Store and its impact for rhet/comp scholars.

NextBusIS/Muni

The San Francisco Municipal Transits Agency (Called “Muni” for short by locals) puts sensors on its buses in order to capture real-time travel data. From this collected data Muni is able to offer real-time predictions of when a bus will arrive at its next stop. The predictions are made publicly available on their website. Several app store developers have included a feature that skims this data in their apps. One such developer, Steven Peterson, included this in his “Routsey” app along with other local routing data options such as BART schedules, train schedules, and trolley data. In July, 2009 Peterson was contacted by the COO of a company calling itself “NextBus Information Systems” (NBIS) claiming that the Roustsey app infringed upon their companies intellectual property rights. Alex Orloff, the COO, contended that NBIS (not affiliated with NextBus sensor products), owned the real time data and demanded a “straight revenue split” or a “data licensing agreement” from Peterson. Peterson, wary at the thought that a public, taxpayer -funded transportation system had sold off their data rights investigated NBIS and Orloff (Batey & Baume). After finding only the most tenuous connection, with NBIS as “the agent for the commercial use of predictive data,” Peterson told Orloff that he would not make a licensing agreement (Eskenazi). Orloff then sent a cease and desist letter to Peterson. Peterson disregarded Orloff’s letter and riled San Franciscans in support of their ownership of public transportation data.

Angered and fearful of attacks from impatient Muni users, Orloff wrote a letter to the Apple iPhone development team asking that Routsey be removed from the App store because it violated NBIS’s copyrights and section 3.2d of Apples own developers license (Batey, Muni Arrival), which states to the developer the following:

“to the best of Your knowledge and belief, Your Application and Licensed Application Information do not and will not violate, misappropriate, or infringe any Apple or third party copyrights, trademarks, rights of privacy and publicity, trade secrets, patents, or other proprietary or legal rights (e.g. musical composition or performance rights, video rights, photography or image rights, logo rights, third party data rights, etc. for content and materials that may be included in Your Application).”
(Apple iPhone Developers License)

Apple, being zealous in the face of possible DMCA charges promptly removed the application from the App Store. In the mean time, Orloff had become a nuisance with other apps that used the NextBus data including Muni Time and iCommute. He sent various communications demanding a variety of rights not limited to revenue sharing, ad space on the app and full shutdown or rework of the app. Peterson, of the Routsey application, refused to be trampled by Orloff and enlisted a corporate lawyer to talk to Apple about returning Routsey to the App Store. In a “joint discovery effort,” Apple was unable to turn up any legitimate evidence that NBIS held any copyright claim to the Muni data and the Routsey application was returned to the App Store in August of 2009 (Batey, Muni APP). Since then, Orloff’s requests to Apple have been repeatedly rebuked. As a result of this turmoil, Muni has made significant strides in making their data public and routinely asks of collaborating enterprises to make this data more public (Raines).

Implications

The implications from the Google Voice story are evident enough. The differences between the wired web and the cellular wireless web forces teachers and students to reconcile a different rhetoric of the public sphere for different locales of the web. The perceived integration of the two webs on the iProducts is something that should prompt discussion about the roles digital technologies can play in both the freeing and obscuring of discourses in the digital realm.

For watchers of intellectual property, the ongoing negotiation of public space between the FCC and closed cellular wireless networks continues to change the digital landscape and we don’t where this change will lead yet. At the moment, Apple is clearly in charge of their “Walled Garden.” Their privatization of the AT&T cellular network and naturalization of the privatization has been enormously successful. However, the FCC is not a toothless bureaucracy because even Apple reacted promptly to complaints about possible DMCA violations. Apple pulls apps first and investigates next. This pull-first-research-later approach reveals a surprisingly cautions policy for such a closed model.

In order to justify the teaching of writing and rhetoric, teachers of composition assume that the public sphere must be amenable to a plurality of voices and opinions to function. In the public sphere, we expect that no individual or group will have the priority to censor out another. The openness of the wired web has been instrumental in identifying previously blocked paths among social networks and the contained cellular wireless model may threaten that balance. Yet, as Ballentine has pointed out we must recognize that the discourses of corporations are complex and not simply bad on their face. No one could deny that the Apple App Store has by chosen to make applications available more often than not and done much to foster innovation.

The future of app publishing and what constraints there are on intellectual property issues, especially, who has the right to arbitrate them in the cellular wireless model will need to be sorted out in the future. This past year merely table set for these questions. It also gives scholars a catalyst to have an important discussion about what public spheres we pay professional attention to and which don’t fall under our purview. Our disciplinary sense of digital property and adaptability continue to be challenged by innovation such as the Apple App store. It will be a delight to see what impacts these technologies will eventually have on the discourses that circulate within the public sphere.

Works Cited

@seankovacks. Web log post. Twitter.com. 27 July 2009. Web. 28 February 2010.

Ad Hoc Public Interest Spectrum Coalition. “Comments of the Ad Hoc Public Interest Spectrum Coalition.” Petition to Confirm a Consumer’s Right to Use Internet Communications Software and Attach Devices to Wireless Networks Proceeding #11361. Federal Communications Commission. 30 April 2007. PDF file. 28 February 2010.

Apple Answers the FCC’s Questions. “Today Apple filed with the FCC the following answers to their questions.” Apple.com/Hotnews. Apple inc., 1 August 2009. Web. 28 February 2010.

Ballentine Brian D. “Writing in the Disciplines versus Corporate Workplaces: On the Importance of Conflicting Disciplinary Discourses in the Open Source Movement and the Value of Intellectual Property.” Across the Disciplines 6 (2010): n. pag. 19 Jan. 2009 Web 28 February 2010.

Batey, Eve. “Muni Arrival Data App Killer Fears Attacks From Enraged Data/Transit Fiends?” SF Appeal 26 June 2009. Web.

Batey, Eve. “Muni App Makers, Rejoice: MTA, Apple Disputes Private Company’s Claims To Own Arrival Data.” SF Appeal 19 August 2009. Web. 28 February 2010.

Batey, Eve and Matt Baume. “Does A Private Company Own Your Muni Arrival Times? SF Appeal 25 June 2009. Web 28 February 2010.

Betteridge, Ian. “Who’s the publisher in the App Store model?” Technovia. 12 June 2009.Blog. 28 February 2010.

Buskirk, Eliot Van. “Google Voice Web App Circumvents Apple’s Blockade.” Epicenter Blog. Wired Magazine., 26 Jan 2010. Web. 4 28 February 2010.

Cohen, Peter. “iTunes Store Goes DRM-free.” MacWorld, 6 Jan. 2009. Web. 28 February 2010.

Eskenazi, Joe. “Who Owns Muni’s Arrival and Departure Times? That Depends on Whom You Ask.” The Snitch. SFWeekly.com. 25 July 2009. Web. 28 February 2010.

iPhone safari 3G. “Safari.” Apple, Inc. 2010. Web. 28 February 2010.

Kinkaid, Mark. ” Apple Is Growing Rotten To The Core: Official Google Voice App Blocked From App Store.” Tech Crunch., 27 July 2009. Web. 28 February 2010.

Malik, Om. “GrandCentral Reborn as Google Voice, a Suite of VoIP Services.” GigaOm. 11 March 2009. Blog. 28 February 2010.

Raines, Cohen. “Muni Releases Nextbus GPS Arrival Data Stream for App Developers.” Transit Camp Bay Area. Google Group. 12 November 2009. Listserv. 28 February 2010.

Schlichting, James D. “Federal Communications Commission Communication #DA 09-1736.” Letter to Catherine A. Novelli, Apple Inc. 31 July 2009. PDF file. 28 February 2010.

Wireless Telecommunication Bureau. Federal Communications Commission. n.d. Web. 28 February 2010.

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1 Date delimited site search performed on Feburary 24th, 2010 using the key words iPod, iPhone and iPad