John Logie

Champing at the bits: Computers, copyright, and the composition classroom

Abstract Increasingly, students and instructors within composition classrooms are using electronic media for the circulation, appropriation, and alteration of texts and images. Because these practices could, in a worst-case scenario, lead to significant penalties under current copyright laws, this article provides an introduction to intellectual property law, focusing specifically on those elements of law most likely to impinge upon classroom practices. A brief history of United States intellectual property jurisprudence demonstrates that novel communicative technologies have repeatedly prompted calls for revision to copyright, and further, the term of copyright has steadily expanded in response to these technologies. A survey of current national and international developments in intellectual property policy suggests that additional extensions of copyright terms are likely unless consumers of intellectual property aggressively assert their rights to fair use and a robust public domain. The article concludes with a short list of World Wide Web-based resources for further study.

Homestead acts: Rhetoric and property in the American west, and on the world wide web

Abstract This paper analyzes a recent Internet‐based protest action in terms of its historical and rhetorical antecedents. Throughout the mid‐1990s, the GeoCities company offered visitors a “deed”; to a small portion of electronic storage space, so long as these virtual “homesteaders”; maintained and improved these parcels of cyberspace‐based “property.”; This exchange, based expressly on the terms of the 1862 Homestead Act, proved popular, and GeoCities thrived to the point that it was taken over by the Internet giant Yahoo. When Yahoo circulated a change in the GeoCities Terms of Service which claimed ownership to the intellectual property found on the homesteaders’ home pages, the residents of GeoCities responded with a visually sophisticated protest which quickly generated national publicity and created a public relations nightmare for Yahoo. This protest ultimately demonstrated the homesteaders ‘ability to organize online, and then to discover the available means of persuasion within the relatively novel communicative spaces of the World Wide Web.

Lost in translation: The influence of 20th century literary theory on Plato's texts

Abstract Close readings of passages addressing “books” and “authors” in 20th Century renditions of Platos dialogues reveal highly variable translations. These translations track along with the rise and fall of literary! critical movements celebrating and critiquing the figure of the author, and respond to the increasingly dominant understanding of the Fifth Century BCE as a predominantly oral culture. These ultimately contradictory representations of the same Platonic texts illustrate how translators craft texts tailored to their times ‘favored theoretical constructs. Nevertheless, the cumulative effect of these variable translations is to suggest the degree to which Platos treatment of questions of authorship shapes and circumscribes putatively modern discussions of these questions.

Dark days: Understanding the historical context and the visual rhetorics of the SOPA/PIPA blackout

Introduction: Cyberactivism 2.0: Studying Cyberactivism a Decade into the Participatory Web Martha McCaughey 1. Trust and Internet Activism: From Email to Social Networks Laura J. Gurak 2. Dark Days: Understanding the Historical Context and the Visual Rhetorics of the SOPA/PIPA Blackout John Logie 3. The Harry Potter Alliance: Sociotechnical Contexts of Digitally Mediated Activism Jennifer Terrell 4. Dangerous Places: Social Media at the Convergence of Peoples, Labor, and Environmental Movements Richard Widick 5. The Arab Spring and Its Social Media Audiences: English and Arabic Twitter Users and Their Networks Axel Bruns, Tim Highfield, and Jean Burgess 6. Twitter as the Peoples Microphone: Emergence of Authorities during Protest Tweeting Alexander Halavais and Maria Garrido 7. From Crisis Pregnancy Centers to TeenBreaks.com: Anti-Abortion Activisms Use of Cloaked Websites Jessie Daniels 8. Art Interrupting Business, Business Interrupting Art: Re(de)fining the Interface Between Business and Society Constance Kampf 9. Cyberactivism of the Radical Right in Europe and the USA: What, Who, and Why? Manuela Caiani and Rossella Borri 10. Young Chinese Workers, Contentious Politics, and Cyberactivism in the Global Factory Dorothy Kidd 11. Women Activists of Occupy Wall Street: Consciousness-Raising and Connective Action in Hybrid Social Movements Megan Boler and Christina Nitsou 12. Emergent Social Movements in Online Media and States of Crisis: Analyzing the Potential for Resistance and Repression Online Lee Salter

INTRODUCTION: Marking a major milestone

This is the sixth special issue collaboration between the Association of Internet Researchers and Information, Communication & Society. As in the past, the papers included here were initially selected on the basis of abstracts submitted to – and later presented at – the 2012 Internet Research Conference hosted by the University of Salford in Manchester, England (and MediaCity: UK). We thank the conference organizers for their considerable work in ensuring a successful conference: Conference Chair Ben Light, Programme Chair Feona Attwood, and AoIR President Alex Halavais. As contributors to previous editions of these special issues can attest, the publication schedule for these issues is highly compressed. As editors, we wish to express our gratitude to the contributors for meeting the very tight turnaround times for revisions. Their work is a testament to the commitment of the AoIR community. The Association of Internet Researchers, founded on 30 May 1999, passed an important milestone this year. The Association was born into a landscape where the major internet security concern of the moment was the Melissa e-mail virus. The world’s 250 million internet users were exploring the possibilities of the then-year-old search engine named Google! (Google lost the exclamation point a little while later). Napster was also launched in May 1999 and, as with so many internet-related endeavors, Napster burned brightly and then burned out. The internet of 2012 is radically different from the internet that surrounded AoIR’s founders, and yet AoIR has kept pace with the remarkable shifts in this medium, and served as a gathering point for a network of scholars deep and rich enough to engage with the deep and rich networks we find online. And it has been doing so for 13years. AoIR is now a teenager. And based on the 2012 Conference, this teenager is really into Twitter (but also maintaining a healthy array of interests that expand well beyond the 140 character limit).