At the 2009 meeting of the Intellectual Property Caucus of the Conference on College Composition and Communication, I mentioned that our department is designing a new 300-level course for our writing major at Grand Valley State University: Authorship, Creativity, and Copyright.

What follows is a work-in-progress draft of the course description and course objectives. It still has to go forward for department review and then to faculty governance before becoming an official course.

Authorship, Creativity, and Copyright

Course Description

Students will explore the nature of of authorship, develop informed perspectives on creativity and originality, and understand the basic principles of and recent issues surrounding copyright.

Course Objectives

Students will

• study historical and contemporary views of authorship (e.g. author as patron, Foucault, Barthes);
• examine the relationships between creativity, originality, and intertextuality;
• explore collaboration in terms of authorship, creativity, legal rights of the collaborators, and the editor/author relationship;
• learn basic U.S. Copyright principles such as fair use, work-for-hire, and royalty-free, as well as what rights publishers may request of authors in exchange for publishing their work;
• discuss authorial ethical considerations, such as attribution, ghost writing, use of boiler plating, originality, and reliability & accuracy;
• examine contemporary copyright issues which have been debated in recent years.