WHO OWNS THIS TEXT?

UTAH STATE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Contents

Introduction: Connecting Plagiarism, Intellectual Property, and Disciplinary Habits Carol Peterson Haviland and Joan A. Mullin....................................................................11 Open Sourcery: Computer Science and the Logic of Ownership Marvin Diogenes, Andrea Lunsford, and Mark Otuteye...................................................................................202 Collaborative Authorship in the Sciences: Anti-ownership and Citation Practices in Chemistry and Biology Lise Buranen and Denise Stephenson.....................................................493 Studying with Fieldworkers: Archaeology and Sociology Mary R. Boland and Carol Peterson Haviland................................................................................................804 Appropriation, Homage, and Pastiche: Using Artistic Tradition to Reconsider and Redefine Plagiarism Joan A. Mullin..............................................................................1055 Higher Education Administration Ownership, Collaboration, and Publication: Connecting or Separating the Writing of Administrators, Faculty, and Students? Linda S. Bergmann.....................129Conclusion: Rethinking our Use of "Plagiarism" Carol Peterson Haviland and Joan A. Mullin.........................................................................................................156Appendix A: Common Research Questions..............................................................................................................................................................178Appendix B: "Common Knowledge".....................................................................................................................................................................180References.........................................................................................................................................................................................185Index..............................................................................................................................................................................................192Contributors.......................................................................................................................................................................................195

Chapter One

This chapter participates in an increasingly important and sometimes acrimonious debate over how texts can be best circulated, shared, and, when appropriate, owned. Of course, these issues of textual and now digital ownership are not new. They have grown up, in fact, alongside print literacy, capitalism, and commodification, with copyright protection growing ever more powerful: the current protection extends to life plus seventy years for individuals or ninety-five years for corporate entities.

With the rise of the Internet and the Web, many hoped for a new era of democratization of texts that would challenge the power of traditional copyright: anyone could be an author; anyone could make work available for sharing. And to some degree, this hope has been realized, most notably in venues such as Wikipedia and in the explosion of blogging and social networking sites. Yet commercial interests are working incessantly to control the Web, and Hollywood, the music industry, and entities such as Microsoft now concentrate their efforts on getting Congress to protect digital works of all kinds. Democratic sharing of knowledge in this atmosphere is difficult, to say the least. Yet unofficially, people everywhere are sharing information and trading goods, often without any citation (or payment), from peer-to-peer music file sharing to journal article swapping to the open-source code movement in computer science.

For this project, we found computer science to be a particularly fascinating scene for questions about textual ownership. Why? First, computer science (CS) is a new, rapidly evolving field, one in the process of defining itself in relation to traditional ideas about intellectual property, collaboration, shared knowledge, and textual production and textual value. We were drawn to this dynamic, and to the frontier mentality that seems to be an important element of the developing field's sense of itself. Moreover, at our institution, as at many others, CS is a large undergraduate major (among the largest at Stanford), and CS courses have very high enrollments from other majors, too. Thus, a significant number of our first-year composition students will eventually have at least some contact with the field. Another interesting element is that at our institution, as at many others, students in CS courses account for a disproportionately high share of the total number of plagiarism cases, and we wondered why that was the case. As these cases generally hinge on the improper appropriation of code, we found ourselves increasingly focused on the nature of code in CS, its complex relation to what qualifies as an idea, and its parallels to the kinds of texts that writing teachers and humanists work with every day. We began our investigation by identifying eight lecturers and senior research faculty in CS who agreed to talk with us about a set of questions we sent them in advance. (See Appendix A to this book's introduction for the questions. The interview questions were adapted by Andrea, Marvin, and Claude Reichard, director of the writing-in-the-major program at Stanford. Claude was also a member of the interview team, and we thank him here for his essential contributions to that stage of this project.) These eight interviewees teach the full range of CS courses, from first-year through graduate level. Their work includes textbooks and articles as well as code, and one faculty member formerly served as co-chair of Stanford's Judicial Affairs Review Board. One of the informants works in the computer industry as a software developer. In each case, we met with our colleagues in their offices at Stanford for at least an hour, recording their remarks and later transcribing them.

Almost immediately, we could see the commitment these scholars had to the concept of open source (in general, the idea that source code is available for others to use or modify; see www.opensource.org) and to making their work available as widely as possible and as quickly as possible. These commitments lead to a tension, however, one that pits the desire to make a free space (free both in the sense of open to all who care to contribute and also free of charge) for publication of cutting-edge work against the corporate, institutional desire to control the expression of knowledge through traditional publication practices and copyright. We also began to gather information about CS ways of doing things, of their use of boiler-plate, conventions, and commonplaces in code that no one owns and everyone uses. The more we talked to the respondents, the more we came to know the features and special quality of their common space-what we might call the Burkean parlor of computer science. What follows is our attempt to hear a whole range of voices and to use them to explore issues of textual ownership, particularly in CS, but also in other cultural contexts.

PARLOUS PARLORS

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