Authorship and Ownership in Digital Writing: Copyright, ChatGPT, and Creative Appropriation

Catalog description

Digital technologies complicate our understanding of who writes and owns texts as well as what intellectual property is and means. In particular, the creation, use, circulation, and reception of digital texts poses challenges to current copyright law. For instance, can generative AI be authors? Can monkeys make money from their selfies? Who holds the copyright to machine-written novels? Who owns the writing posted to and data created from engagement with social media? Is it a crime to publish an online video remixing copyrighted publications? This course will explore these questions and prepare students to make informed decisions about digital writing practices for their own academic, public, and personal work. Students will learn to analyze and produce texts that show awareness of ways in which intellectual property decisions affect the work of writing in a networked, digital world. For students interested in literature and creative writing, we will address authorship practices and ownership issues for creative literary work published online, including remix, found poetry, use of copyrighted material in video compositions, and other acts of creative appropriation. For students interested in pedagogy, we will discuss pedagogical theories of collaboration, the Fair Use exception to copyright law, movements for students? rights to their own language, and evolving definitions of plagiarism. For students interested in writing and technology, we will examine implications on generative AI on textual production, practices of file sharing and their impact on notions of textual delivery, and the use of plagiarism detection technologies. We will also explore cultural shifts in ideas about copyright and intellectual property as propelled by advances in digital technologies, including alternative approaches to copyright, such as copyleft, open access, and Creative Commons…