Digital Copyright Case
Project Description For this project you will be asked to adopt a position in a fictitious business, and write a series of documents that helps your company work through a complex problem. Therefore, you are expected to treat this case as a real situation. The case is purposely designed with some ambiguities; the purpose of these ambiguities is to give each student the opportunity to tailor his/her response to the project to his/her own expertise. Project Goals
Context You are fairly fresh out of college and your first job is with one of the few stable dot.coms that survived the dot.com crash, an organization called Peace and Prosperity Party (PPParty.com). As their mission statement explains the company primary goal is to make people aware of global issues. Therefore the web site supports many links to global current events, including crisis, celebrations, cultural descriptions, relief funds, and artistic exchange. PPParty.com generates most of its traffic and stockholder interest––in other words, financial support––from the sharing of MP3 files by World Music artists, artists mostly outside the music industry's mainstream. The original idea was to provide a medium for unknown World Music artists to distribute their music. However, the owners of PPParty.com realized that they must also offer the downloads of known World Music Artists––those closer to the mainstream––especially since recent analysis shows that these artist account for over 50% of the hits on this site. You have also heard rumors that the site is considering expanding to support foreign film distribution––both "studio produced" and "homemade"––once the technology is available to widely support the transfer of these digital files. Your responsibility at PPParty.com is to do the work that you were hired to do (you will want to choose this based upon what your major at Purdue will prepare you for). Yet as with many first jobs, you have other business communication responsibilities. Therefore, in this position, you are also the liaison between artists from a region of the world and PPParty.com. Recently, a famous musical artist from the region that you represent has written a letter to your company, expressing displeasure with the "free distribution" of his/her work. Furthermore, this artist has requested that you stop the distribution of his/her work because of the recent court rulings against such file sharing services as MP3.com and Napster.com. Since PPParty.com is structured differently than these other companies who solely focus on the distribution of music, the owners are wondering what digital copyright laws apply to PPParty.com and which do not. The owners are also wondering if different set ups like Morpheus Audio Club or Gnutella may offer better alternatives to the current set up. Ultimately, the owners are worried that any concessions that PPParty.com makes to this displeased artist will set a precedent that other artists will follow and eventually ruin the company. Because of all of the changes in copyright laws since the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act, and the recent court rulings, your bosses have asked you to research digital copyright laws in the United States, the country that the displeased artist is from, and other international contexts. Based upon this research, they want you to draft a viable recommendation of action for them. After you pose a recommendation to your superiors and they respond to it, you will be asked to write a business letter to the artist explaining PPParty.com's course of action.
The purpose of the writing the a Rhetorical Situation statement is twofold. First, it allows you as the writer the opportunity to provide yourself the context that will determine how you will write the following documents. The second purpose is to provide the readers of these documents with contextual details that influence how they understand the following documents. As you will notice from the context of this case, there are some ambiguities (e.g., the global region that you represent, the position that you hold at PPParty.com, the nation from which the displeased artist comes from, the gender of the artist). The purpose of these ambiguities is to give the individual writer working on this case the opportunity to tailor the case to a context that will best replicate the writer's future career goals, as well as give the writer the opportunity to use her/his own expertise as a resource. Therefore, you are responsible for constructing the missing details of the case. In other words, you will explain such details as what your specific position is, and what region you represent. You will use these details to guide research and rhetorical choices later in this project. Memo In 500 word memo make a statement about how you are going to construct this case. This is your opportunity to be creative, but you are also establishing the parameters for your writing context. While constructing your rhetorical situation, you need to, at the very least, address the following points.
You are encouraged to fill in any other details that will help you make this project as real life as you can and make it suitable to understanding a career based upon your major. Grading Criteria
Your first responsibility is to understand the legality of the situation and develop a recommended course of action for PPParty.com. Since your company is based in the United States and your client is paying attention to US court cases on digital copyright, you should start by understanding the local laws:
However recent court cases have put these laws into action; record companies and music artists have taken companies services like MP3.com and Napster.com to court. In response, lawyers from MP3.com and Napster.com have developed viable strategies for defending their clients, and tried to create fair settlements. Yet they have also tried to subvert the capitalistic system as well. Therefore, you will want to do research on some of these recent court cases to understand how these laws are being interpreted and applied. To do this research go to the library and also use search engines to find both primary texts (these are the actual court proceedings) and secondary texts (texts about the court proceedings), but remember that secondary texts can be biased depending upon who writes and publishes them. While doing this project use or combine some of the following terms (this is not a comprehensive list):
or specific court cases (again not a comprehensive list):
Additionally, since your client in producing and recording music outside of the US, the client may be subject to the copyright laws of the client's own country. Therefore you will want to understand what US laws say about international copyright laws and what the copyright laws in the client's country are. Again use a search engine and go to the library. The Research Since there is a lot of information about this case, you should work collaboratively to research this case. In order to successfully complete the case, you should...
Memo For this memo, your supervisor will be the audience. The purpose of the memo is to recommend a plan of action that is based on the research that you have conducted; therefore the memo will also include a justification for this plan of action. Portions of the justification can be visually presented. Your supervisor will read the memo and respond to your proposal. You will then use your proposal and supervisor's response to draft a letter to the client. The document should comply with the techniques for writing a memo. Grading Criteria For this deliverable, you need to
Supervisor Response Memo (SRM) Now that you have written a research memo, you will want to get a response from your supervisor that will guide how you draft a letter to the client. For the purpose of this class, your peers will act as your supervisor, just as you will act as one of your peers' supervisor. On the day that you turn in your research memo, you will send the assigned peer. When you receive your peer's memo, read through it carefully. Then use the rest of the class to compose a response to your peer. In this response, you want to take on the persona of a supervisor; therefore the peer who has sent you this memo becomes your employee. From the position of a supervisor (not a peer reader) you will provide your assessment of your employee's research memo and state what you want your employee to do when s/he drafts a letter responding to the client. The document should comply with the techniques for writing a memo.Grading Criteria For this deliverable, you need to
For the Business letter you are responsible for responding to the client's letter requesting to be removed from PPParty.com's playlist. At this point, you have several factors you must consider when responding to this letter:
As you draft a letter to the client, you will need to negotiate between all four of these factors to determine how you will respond. In the response, you will need to address and justify PPParty.com's position on the client's digital copyrights, and explain PPParty.com's course of action. Because the final letter that you wrote is addressed to the client, it may not clearly demonstrate the decisions that you made when negotiating between the three factors stated above. Therefore, remember that you can use the revision of the Final Rhetorical Statement to explain to the instructor any decisions that you made when drafting this letter. The letter should comply with the techniques for writing a business letter. Grading Criteria For this deliverable, you need to
For the portfolio, you will want to write a letter to the instructor that explains all of the decisions that you made on the other documents in the portfolio. Therefore, this revision will include...
Grading Criteria
|