2008 Computers & Writing Online
Grand Theft Audio: Web 2.0, Multimedial Composing, and Intellectual Property Issues
INTRODUCTION


Hello, Computers and Writing Online attendees. I’m Danielle Nicole DeVoss, an associate professor and director of Professional Writing at Michigan State University. 

And I’m Sue Webb, a colleague of Danielle’s and a graduate student in the digital Rhetoric and Professional Writing program at Michigan State.

We’re pleased to be here to share some of our work with you. Specifically, we’re focusing on a fantastic digital, multimodal argument Sue crafted titled Grand Theft Audio.

This piece is a launching point for us to address the ways in which copyright trouble is inevitable in multimedia composing. Grand Theft Audio draws on appropriated, remixed, and reconfigured audio, video, text, and images to pose a particular argument about the affordances of media convergence and issues of negotiating copyright permissions. 

We want to thank the Computers and Writing organizers for inviting us to give this talk, and we want to extend a digital welcome to all of you.

So here’s the overview. The next chunk of this presentation is an introduction by me to the Grand Theft Audio piece. After that, you’re invited to watch and experience Grand Theft Audio. I then discuss my purpose and goals in crafting the piece.

After that, I do some work to further situate Grand Theft Audio in the current conversations going on in rhetoric and composition about issues of multimodal composing and, specifically, where our work rubs up against intellectual property law.

Our conclusion offers a set of questions, concerns, and issues to be addressed as we continue to do multimodal work in our classrooms, and we offer some tools for navigating intellectual property law and, specifically, using and protecting Fair Use.

We’ve included a postscript video where we talk about the tools we used for this presentation, and how we crafted these materials. And we’ve also linked, from the presentation web site, a resources area that includes a bibliography, links, resources, and more. 

We hope you enjoy this presentation, and we’re eager to talk with you more about it. 

Also linked from the presentation web site are links to threaded discussion forums where we can talk more about multimodal composing and intellectual property, and we look forward to a live chat with you all during Computers and Writing Online.