IP Reports

The CCCC-IP Begins Its Third Decade: Join Us in Tampa at the 4Cs

We warmly invite all CCCC conference attendees to two events sponsored by the Caucus on Intellectual Property and Composition/Communication Studies (CCCC-IP). This is a landmark year for the IP Caucus, which is beginning its third decade and has now been recognized as a standing group. For twenty years the caucus has explored IP issues pertinent to our academic field and beyond, including the following:

plagiarism and authorship
student and teacher rights related to intellectual property
copyright and copyleft as they relate to scholarship and teaching
best practices in teaching students and instructors about intellectual property issues
open access and open-source policies
contemporary issues in intellectual property, such as corporate surveillance and collection of user metadata (as related to scholarship in composition and communication)

The first event will be the annual open meeting of the caucus. During this session, we welcome educators with questions and concerns about intellectual property to join us in discussions of how intellectual property affects the work of scholars, teachers, and students in our field.

This year’s interactive, action-focused meeting includes a breakout session into four roundtable groups. Each roundtable group, led by a facilitator, will discuss a particular set of IP issues in order to elicit practical solutions, action plans, lobbying strategies, and the production of documents for political, professional, and pedagogical use within CCCC and beyond. Near the end of the meeting, the roundtables reconvene to share their discussions, plans, and recommendations for future action.

The session will also feature remarks by Heather Joseph, executive director of the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC), advocate for the passage of the Federal Research Public Access Act, and organizer of Access2Research.

This year’s roundtables:

1. Legal and Legislative Developments

This roundtable hosts a discussion of the previous year’s legal and legislative IP developments as they affect students and educators. In previous years our colleagues at this table have discussed the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), which under some circumstances can have an adverse impact on what students and faculty are able to accomplish in the classroom as well as additional legislation that affect copyright and intellectual property. Discussions have also touched on court cases being closely watched by the educational community, such as one involving Georgia State University’s system of electronic reserves. No matter what the specific topics, discussion will revolve around finding ways to safeguard the ability of students and teachers to make appropriate use of copyrighted material in furtherance of legitimate educational goals.

Roundtable 2: IP Advocacy and Outreach within and beyond CCCC/NCTE

With both short- and long-term planning in mind, this roundtable considers how the CCCC-IP might work to broaden its work as a leading advocate of IP awareness within CCCC and NCTE. In particular, participants will strategize how CCCC-IP might build professional alliances with, and learn from, other professional organizations who have constructed influential professional identities such as the American Library Association, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition.

Roundtable 3: IP in the Classroom: Pedagogical Approaches

As multimodal composition pedagogies become increasingly prevalent, so does the necessity for student-centered teaching about copyright and fair use. This table invites participants to brainstorm innovative ways to teach IP in composition classroom–when composing with text or in other modalities. As composition students write for print, online, mobile, and presentational formats and for a greater audience diversity than ever before, both teachers and students need to know how to handle a wider diversity of intellectual property issues that arise. We’ll also brainstorm about effective ways to distribute these pedagogies with the wider CCCC community.

Roundtable 4: IP Stories from the Field

Anecdotes about being unable to publish certain video clips or textual sections in scholarly articles, being unable to publish student work that uses particular songs or images, or encountering students whose source use practices challenge our definitions of plagiarism are not uncommon in writing studies teacher-scholar lore. No formalized collection of these stories yet exists, however. This roundtable seeks to change that. For this roundtable we invite Caucus members and visitors to share their stories about and experiences with IP, plagiarism, and copyright issues. We will video record responses to gain a collection of the IP encounters that are part of our professional lives.

The above discussions will take place Wednesday, March 18, from 2:00-5:30 p.m. in Room 18 of the Tampa, FL, Convention Center.

The second event will be a panel, “Twenty Years of CCCC-IP: A Roundtable Discussion on Intellectual Property and Composition Studies,” that will explore what intellectual property has meant and will mean for composition studies. Co-chaired by Timothy Amidon (Colorado State University) and Clancy Ratliff (University of Louisiana at Lafayette), the panel also will include Jeffrey Galin (Florida Atlantic University), John Logie (University of Minnesota, Minneapolis); Jessica Reyman (Northern Illinois University), James Porter, (Miami University), and Nick Shockey, Director of Programs and Engagement at the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC). Serving as respondents will be Johndan Johnson-Eilola (Clarkson University) and Danielle Nicole DeVoss (Michigan State University). This session is listed in the CCCC program as G.44 and will take place Friday, March 20, from 9:30-10:45 a.m. in the Marriott, Florida Ballroom VI, Level Two.

For more information about the two CCCC-IP sessions, contact this year’s senior chair of the IP Caucus: Tim Amidon. In addition, visit this video introduction to the caucus by Dr. Amidon.

This column is sponsored by the Intellectual Property Committee of the CCCC and the CCCC-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.

CCCC IP Committee Website

Previous Reports

The 2014 CCCC Intellectual Property Annual: An Opportunity to Contribute

Open Invitation to the Intellectual Property Caucus @ CCCC Indianapolis, 2014

Intellectual Property-Related Motion at the CCCC Business Meeting

2012 Tri-Annual DMCA Rulemaking Creates Expanded Use Rights for Educators

An Invitation to the Intellectual Property Caucus at CCCC in Las Vegas

A Big Win for Georgia State for Online Reserves

Open Access: Where Next?

Tri-Annual DMCA Rulemaking Process Underway—IP Caucus Member Participates

IP and Your Professional Organizations

A Ruling in the Georgia State University e-Reserve Case