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last.updated 4.16.06

Intellectual Property: Academia and the Workplace

Purpose

Intellectual property, as Barthes's scholarship implies, is a fairly recent phenomena in Western culture. As writers and others began to see the opportunity to make a profit from their work, laws were developed to protect their works as intellectual property. Now we see multiple intellectual property lawsuits. For example, George Lucas had unsuccessfully sued the US government for its use of Star Wars to describe its missile defense project. Dan Browne (of DaVinci Code fame) was recently unsuccessfully sued for drawing upon ideas he read in non-fiction texts. And, at one time, the Beastie Boys were sued for using three notes from a jazz musician whom they credit.

In the academy, students are given hellfire and brimstone lectures about plagiarism when they are taught citation conventions. Yet, in some professional contexts–even within the academy–writers taking text wholesale without crediting the author (or boilerplating) is an expected practice. We will work together on parsing out the differences between plagiarism and boilerplating and discuss effective strategies for teaching intellectual property in specific disciplinary contexts.

Discussion–Barthes

We will address the following questions...

• What questions do you have about Barthes's article?
• What does Barthes mean by the death of the author?
• How important is the author to understanding a text? What does accepting the author's death buy us? What gets lost by it?
• Think about a work of literature vs. a computer software manual vs. the manual that came with the new iPod you bought. How important is it for the audience to know the author for each text and why?.

Discussion–Howard

We will address the following questions...

• What questions do you have about Howard's article?
• How does she define plagiarism? What is patchwriting and how is it different from plagiarism? Do you think that patchwriting should be an offense in academic contexts? Why?
• How does Howard's argument speak to Barthes's notion of the death of the author?

Discussion–Vega

We will address the following questions...

• What questions do you have about Vega's interview with Paul Weber?
• What is boilerplating? Why do professional writers boilerplate texts?
• How does boilerplating speak to Barthes's notion of the death of the author?
• Why is the team that writes a specific document not responsible for citing the original authors of the boilerplated text?
• Can/should an institution boilerplate text from another institution? For example, if a sub-division is rewriting their CC&Rs and another sub-divisions has articulated a regulation they want to adopt, can they boilerplate this text?
• How would you teach intellectual property to future writers in your discipline?