Joint ACCUTE/SDH Session: Literature and the Copyfight

Organizer: Mark A. McCutcheon (Athabasca University)

As ever-stricter copyright tightens control over the modes of literary production (and, in the process, criminalizes growing numbers of citizens and consumers), critical scholarship is urgently needed to intervene on the question of copyright: once a staple stimulus for literary and cultural production that now tends more to stifle it. As William St Clair shows in The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period, copyright, or intellectual property (IP), represents a foundational but under-examined condition of literary production; today, the regulation of IP is changing fast, in international copyright law (ACTA), Canadian copyright law (Bill C-32), and debates over copyright in Canadian education (e.g. Access Copyright, fair dealing, and Open Access). Many of these changes in IP regulation are prompted by digital media, and both IP regulation and new media networks now powerfully influence literary production and reception (e.g. Google Books, Scribd). The changing IP policy environment has polarized interests into a “copyfight” between copyright “maximalists” (e.g. corporate intermediaries that lobby for term extensions and litigate against consumers) and a “copyleft” of critical creators, scholars, and organizations (e.g. alternative licensing initiatives like Creative Commons). This session invites papers on the relationship between literature, copyright, and the copyfight.

Papers on any subject relevant to literature and the copyfight are welcome, for example:

• literary representations of intellectual property
• copyright in literary history
• IP policy changes in post-secondary education (e.g Access Copyright)
• digital remediations and redefinitions of literature
• case studies in copyright enforcement or litigation by authors or estates
• creative license, appropriation, fair dealing
• theory and methodology of critical cultural and legal studies

Please send abstracts (as per ACCUTE guidelines) to mccutcheon@athabascau.ca by 1 November 2011.

[Originally posted on the ACCUTE website]