Overview
đ Part 1 (2 short essay)
Pose a question, share a quote from the reading, or make a comment about the reading assigned for this week. Draw connections between an idea or example from the reading and something from your own experiences of, and practices vis-a-vis, intellectual property laws and controls today, either to confirm or challenge what the author(s) have argued, or to express confusion or disagreement with the substance, form, or even style of the readings.
Reading1:http://www.ip-watch.org/2012/02/27/%E2%80%98balanc...
Reading 2: in the file
Questions and comments will be mostly graded for completion, but only if they pertain to the assigned readings and exhibit some engagement with their letter and spirit. You must reference something specific from the reading and include citations and a works cited page.
Do not just summarize the reading. Rote, straightforward summaries of the reading that do not point back to your own experience will not earn any marks.
Length requirements: approx. 250 words
Formatting requirements: Double-spaced, 12-point font, Times New Roman/Arial/Cambria. Citations should be formatted in APA citation style (either 6th or 7th edition), with a bibliography or works cited section at the end of their submission.
đ Part 2 (one essay, 1200 words)
Formatting requirements: Double-spaced, 12-point font, Times New Roman/Arial/Cambria. Citations should be formatted in APA citation style (either 6th or 7th edition). Students unfamiliar with APA citations are encouraged to review the Purdue Online Writing Labâs manual or avail themselves of an online citation generating service.
Submissions should include their student name, number, and course information on the first page of their submission (e.g., in the header).
Students may use first-person pronouns (e.g., âI,â âmy,â etc.) in the course of their work.
Instructions: Choose one of the following topics or themes on which to write your essay.
a. Is the intellectual property system fair to users? Why or why not? What law or policy reforms might make the system fairer? (Provide one or more examples or focus on one or more forms of intellectual property to support your argument.)
- Is the intellectual property system fair to creators? Why or why not? What law or policy reforms might make the system fairer? (Provide one or more examples or focus on one or more forms of intellectual property to support your argument.)
- Is the intellectual property system fair to users and/or creators from marginalized communities? Why or why not? What law or policy reforms might make the system fairer? (Provide one or more examples or focus on one or more forms of intellectual property to support your argument.)
- Is the intellectual property system fair to developing nations? Why or why not? What law or policy reforms might make the system fairer? (Provide one or more examples or focus on one or more forms of intellectual property to support your argument.)
- Has the impact of the internet, social media, and/or digital technologies on the intellectual property system been positive or negative for users? What law or policy reforms are necessary for the system to deal with digital media and culture? (Provide one or more examples or focus on one or more forms of intellectual property to support your argument.)
- Has the impact of the internet, social media, and/or digital technologies on the intellectual property system been positive or negative for creators? What law or policy reforms are necessary for the system to deal with digital media and culture? (Provide one or more examples or focus on one or more forms of intellectual property to support your argument.)
- Can the intellectual property system be used in order to address important socioeconomic, cultural, or environmental concerns? Or is intellectual property actually contributing to those concerns, or else making it harder to address them? How so? (Provide one or more examples or focus on one or more forms of intellectual property to support your argument.)
- Students may pursue their own research agenda and pose their own questions (or modify an existing one), with the prior approval of the instructor.
Do not include the text of prompt or question in your submission, as this will inflate your Turnitin similarity index score; only include your specific thesis or question (see below).
- Draft a one- or two-sentence thesis or question that you want to explore in the paper, e.g., "In this essay, I will argue that intellectual property and copyright law needs to be strengthened in order to address the challenge of AI-generated music that reproduces the sound and style of musical performers.â
- Identify and list four (4) academic sources, along with their bibliographical information, using APA citation style (see above). (Course assigned readings cannot be used; all four academic sources have to be from outside of the course.) An academic source can include an article from a peer-reviewed journal, a chapter from a text published by a university or scholarly press, a paper delivered at a scholarly conference, etc. If you are unsure as to whether a source can be considered sufficiently academic, you should ask the instructor to confirm its acceptability.
- Provide annotations for each of your sources by explaining how you identified or tracked down your source. Then summarize the key ideas or arguments of each text, and explain
the relevance and usefulness â as well as strength and weaknesses â of your source for the completion of the paper, providing reasons as to why it was chosen and how it will help you to either make the argument or undertake the analysis you want to make or undertake, or how it will assist you in developing or narrowing down a topic.
An example of an annotation (for a paper for another course) is as follows:
1. Johnston, JoseĚe and Judith Taylor. 2008. Feminist Consumerism and Fat Activists: A Comparative Study of Grassroots Activism and the Dove Real Beauty Campaign. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 33 (4): 941-966.
I found this article on October 2, 2023, by doing a search in the library catalogue using the keywords âethical consumerism.â It was among the top five results; I chose it over the others because it was explicitly addressed to the relationship between consumerism and activism, and also was article-length, whereas the others were book- length and focused on other, somewhat unrelated topics, like product placement.
Johnston and Taylor undertake a comparative analysis of the Dove Real Beauty campaign and the fat-activist performance group, Pretty, Porky, and Pissed Off (PPPO). The authors argue that both Dove and PPPO seek to challenge the beauty industry, but that the two campaigns proceed from very different assumptions about how to question conventional ideals of femininity.
This article will be useful for my essay, which will be on the ethics and politics of Starbucksâ campaigns for corporate social responsibility. Besides providing useful background information on how companies today are trying to build their brandsâ ethical profiles, the article identifies some of the problems with corporate social activism. While I will be looking at Starbucks and its promotion of âfair tradeâ coffee, many of the broader criticisms that Johnston and Taylor direct against Dove can be extended to Starbucks. The article makes a strong case for questioning the motives behind the Real Beauty campaign, but the authors do not really come to any clear conclusion about whether corporate activism does more harm than good.
Annotated bibliographies will be evaluated according to the following criteria (in order of importance):
- rigour and depth of annotations, that is, how well they summarize the key arguments or ideas from each source, relate them to the question or topic for the paper they have chosen, and identify their relative strengths or limitations;
- choice of academic sources that are relevant and useful for the chosen topic for the paper, have been drawn from reputable and reliable scholarly publications or presses, and could reasonably contribute to their paper;