The Movable Type templates (which I’ve only so far modified very slightly for this weblog) include a section for Creative Commons licenses, which I’ve thought about using here, in particular an attribution license. However, the smart points folks have made in the Creative Commons discussion at Metafilter caused me to stop and think a little; I still haven’t made up my mind.
Compositionists who do research in their classrooms, furthermore, are expected to respect students’ writing as the property of the student, and to take considerable care around issues of permissions before reproducing that writing. And student anonymity and permissions around writing and representation are why I’m being weird about self-identifying on this weblog.
What I’m trying to lead into, I guess, is my focus for this post (the thing I didn’t quite make it to yesterday) on the concerns associated with an understanding of writing as property.
By the logic above, writing can be owned. We also know that writing can be sold, and university plagiarism policies (and the recent Jayson Blair scandal) suggest that it can be stolen: intellectual property debates are hardly news to the Web. I want to see if I can use the ownership angle here as a another perspective, another slice, another way to look at the economics of computers and writing.
So: some loose observations. Hard-stance pro-copyright folks like the RIAA assume, as a starting point, that copyright gives the creator (for the sake of convenience, I’m going to say “author” from here on) the rights to the financial rewards and benefits that derive from her creation, and so provides a financial incentive for creativity. If writers own writing, and can sell it for economic benefit, then that’ll stimulate more writing, or so the logic goes. However, I think the counterargument could be made that copyright encourages writing among those who do it for money, and from what I’ve recently been reading (thank you, Mr. Mankiw), economists seem to think that people who do things for money want to maximize profits and produce more efficiently. More writing, more money. At this point in the argument, I suppose it might be appropriate to risk elitism and bring up Stephen King, Tom Clancy, Michael Crichton, and other popular members of the at-least-one-book-a-year club. (Of course, I’m sure people have also sniped that frequent weblogging sacrifices quality for regularity. Sigh: Mike’s elitism immediately bites him in the ass.) Financial incentives for writing may result in assembly-line quantity and quality; as a writer and a writing teacher, I tend to want to foster the latter. (I mean, foster quality, not the assembly-line part.)
On the other hand, to use weblogging as an example yet again, there are people who write for free and want their writing to circulate; the full force of copyright law does little for them. So by this perspective there are two different types of production of writing: for profit and for pleasure. (How many different types of consumption are there, I wonder? I know I started to get at this yesterday with exchange value and grades, but it’s still a long ways from the “answer” stage.) And yet, while weblogs might seem to usefully illustrate an alternative economic paradigm for writing, I don’t think they would be considered what economists call a “public good,” because there’s still a pretty steep price of admission; namely, the price of a computer and monthly internet access. (My mother was the head of a library in a low-income community, where I sometimes helped maintain the computer terminals with public access to the internet; I wonder if anyone has ever dones a study to see how the people in such communities use the Web. I saw lots of e-mail use and research for school; very little online shopping or weblog reading.) Despite the access issue, though, I can’t really compare weblogs to, say, cable television (which also requires an initial investment in technology and a monthly subscription fee), because the weblog community produces and consumes. Writing kind of becomes its own currency?
Is that maybe a lesson worth trying to teach in the composition classroom?
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