Intellectual Property, or "That's My Sex-Box and Her Name is Sony"

So a continually repeated reminder present in Reyman was the "it's not new, it's just a different manifest" that she begins on pg 4 and continues to explore through the copyright laws. It seems the phrase "these tensions are not new" is the phrase du jour.

What I found really really helpful, and what I want to touch on here, is her explication on pg 7 of what is at work in intellectual property issues as well as assumptions that under-gird it as well as how that is rhetorically framed. I finally understand what people mean about how the issue of production becomes the central concern and is then an issue of circulating discourse. And her tracing the scholarship on intellectual property was amazingly clear. When she claimed that the relationship between "technical architecture and social practice" is what renders come Internet technology "politically charged," a lot of things were cleared up for me. I found her tracing the history of intellectual property something I want to return to and reference again.

What I am still struggling with is the notion of "authorship" that becomes synonymous with creator or writer. I get that creation has always been linked to ownership, and a key historical example of ownership/creator has been the author, but I'm not sure how authorship becomes the de facto designation of owner or ownership. Maybe I'm overly misreading the nature of ownership that Reyman is talking about, but the connection between intellectual property and authorship seems to hinge on the assumption that it is productive to see owner the same as creator and distributor and author.


This is not to say that here aren't connections between these terms and what they produce; it is instead to say that I'm not sure how and why certain terms are being used and brought together under the larger category of "intellectual property." The issue becomes clearer to me in Logie's work in that he is encouraging tech comm. teachers to get students engaged in the intellectual property issues that impact their work--both positively and negatively. Especially since both Reyman & Logie seems to be fore-fronting the fact that the favor goes to the copyright holder at this time and that puts urgency on the role of author and the manifestations of authorship recalled above. This is where I wish I understood the difference Reyman & Logie is making between author, writer, creator and owner.

Finally, it is interesting to see how tech communicators are positioned as a kind of mediator, savior and expert for so many of the problems we've read about this semester. Not that there's anything wrong with that...