My I.P. Awakening

This is the text that served as the basis for my brief talk at the 10th Anniversary of CCCC-IP, the Intellectual Property Caucus of the Conference on College Composition and Communication.

I commenced a Master’s in 1991 at the University of Illinois at Chicago and expected upon my departure to be a newly minted Joycean, educating a generation or two of English majors as to Joyce’s pre-eminent genius among the Moderns.

So how did I end up here?

To make a long story short, as I was completing my Master’s thesis in 1993 I was struggling to understand Finnegans Wake, and leafing through the long-out-of-print concordance, when the Mosaic browser rocketed up through the phone lines from my university’s sister campus in Urbana-Champaign.

I immediately began using this browser to determine whether there were any significant Finnegans Wake resources online.

There were.

This was the dot.edu era of the Internet, and the newly-developed World Wide Web had already been colonized by Joyceans who,as a group, are unusually technically adept. In a matter of minutes I located an electronic copy of Finnegans Wake at a Canadian website and clicked to download it. I was excited to learn that my paper-based searches of particular words in the Wake would now be thoroughly obsolete, and enthralled with the prospect of searching the Wake as I might any other electronic document.

And then I got the message which sent me spiralling out of Joyce studies and into the welcoming arms of Rhetoric. The Canadian website warned me, pointedly, that as an American citizen I was not at liberty to download the electronic Wake, owing to American copyright law. While the Wake was public domain in Canada, it was not in the U.S.

I somehow completed my thesis, but this experience gnawed at me. The then-infant World Wide Web seemed overflowing with possibility. After all, the Canadians responsible for the electronic edition of the Wake wanted no money. They had contributed considerable effort and labor to the task of creating the elctronic Wake and offered it freely to the world. And American law stood between U.S. scholars and this resource.

I saw clearly that the World Wide Web could never realize its potential without a significant shift in our laws and our collective understanding of copyright, and I began seeking out others who shared my concern.

At almost precisely this time, Karen LeFevre and Andrea Lunsford were having a parallel discussion, bemoaning the degree to which the work of compositionists was coming into conflict with copyright law. The following year, I found myself at the first Intellectual Property Caucus, and further, found the community of scholars that would support, challenge, and sustain my thinking about intellectual property issues over this last decade.

For me, the issue at the heart of my work has always been maximizing access, particularly scholarly access, but also public access to creative works. While I am squarely committed to securing compensation for creators, my decade of IP research has taught me that copyright enforcement is often well-distant from questions of compensation for creators.

Over the past few years, I’ve sometimes wondered whether pursuing this difficult and sometimes arcane area of the law is appropriate against the backdrop of an ongoing war. What I have discovered is that copyright policy provides a fairly reliable index of whether policy makers are in fact working on behalf of their constituents or not. With this in mind, I’ve come to see this work as critical to developing an informed understanding of how policy is set more generally. And this is the understanding that will sustain my work in the coming decade.