Reading! And the Web?

As evidenced by our heated (albeit productive) class discussion on Wednesday, plagiarism is an extremely complex issue, and it’s one with few black-and-white answers. Its definition and consequences have long been a point of contention in both academic and public contexts, and the waters have been muddied even further by the advent of the web. In this post, I’d like to explore some of the issues with content ownership and intellectual property on the web and see if I can’t relate them back to our academic context.

One of the most intriguing movements of the late 20th century is copyleft, which was inspired in part by new technologies burgeoning in the 1970s and 80s. As its name hints, copyleft positions itself as an alternative to copyright legislation, which some would argue has only become convoluted and unwieldy in the last century. Whereas copyright is intended to claim intellectual property and prevent others from profiting from identical/similar work, copyleft disclaims this ownership (to an extent—more on this later) and actively encourages others to share, reuse, redistribute, rework, and in some cases even profit from the original author’s work.

While it may not be explicitly copyleft, Creative Commons is an organization with their own, contemporary approach to similar goals. Most of the licenses that Creative Commons maintains encourage varying levels of sharing, remixing, and reusing,¹ but they have additional terms which are intended to simultaneously protect the originality of the author’s work and prevent abuse (or commercial use).

This brings me to Wikipedia, most of the content of which is licensed by a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike (CC BY-SA) license. The terms of this license allow users to paraphrase portions of or even copy/paste entire Wikipedia articles, but under two important conditions: the user must attribute the text to the proper Wikipedia article, and they must release the “new” work under a similar license.²

It’s the “attribution” requirement that is particularly interesting to me. The original CC BY-SA gives the licensor responsibility to define their own terms for attribution: “You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work).”³ However, to me at least, Wikipedia’s own attribution terms and requirements are somewhat unclear. Wikipedia’s own Reusing Wikipedia content article implies that a simple link somewhere on the licensee’s page is satisfactory. As one Creative Commons blog entry discusses, surveyed Wikipedia contributors loosely agreed with this statement. Both of the articles I linked to also mention that a list of contributing authors should also be cited if possible, but the very nature of Wikipedia makes this impractical for most content.

However, is a simple link to a Wikipedia article truly sufficient? I tend to believe that it’s not, and I know for a fact that it isn’t by the standards of higher-education institutions. As we saw in the wiki assignment, a paraphrased intro paragraph with a link sitting underneath it is simply not acceptable in academia. But how do we reconcile these two standards? Should there be compromise between the two contexts, or no? I’m of the opinion that all uses of Wikipedia’s content should be cited properly according to an academic standard like the MLA. I realize though that the technological knowledge required to do this is not common by any means as proven again by the wiki assignment—most students understand how to use Word’s inbuilt footnote system, but very few understand how to use the <ref> tag in a wiki, and even fewer understand how to write the HTML required for footnotes in other, non-wiki contexts.

Class blogs like this one bring up an even more interesting set of questions. When referencing another blog article, is an inline link sufficient, as I’ve done here? When does a footnote become necessary, and how do those standards differ from class blogs to personal or professional blogs? (Even as I write this entry, I hesitate to think that I’ve cited everything perfectly. In fact, I find that proper MLA footnotes are overkill for what I’m doing here.) How far out of my way should I go to find a so-called “stable” URL for all of the pages I’ve referenced, one which will remain identical and accessible for decades to come? In many cases, this is actually impossible—Wikipedia’s revision archival system comes close, but there’s still no guarantee that their URLs will stay intact for as long as may be necessary. In a broader sense, how far do we go as a society to “protect” content? Perhaps more importantly, how do we decide what content is worth protecting?

Ultimately, I’m left with more questions than answers, as usual.