Description of Writing Assignment Write an exploratory essay about a problem that is quite new. Emerging technologies regularly confront society with problems that did not previously exist. Your goal is not to come up with a solution to the problem, but to understand how some recent innovation or change in the status quo has created a problem that is new and unfamiliar. Part of your objective is to explore how and why the problem really is different from previous problems that might seem similar.

Student Writing Sample

The Meaning of Property in the Digital Age

     Everyone knows that shoplifting a CD is illegal and wrong. Some people feel that stealing from a big company is not as bad as stealing from an individual, but that doesn't change the fact that shoplifting is theft. However, not everyone agrees that copying a friend's CD onto a cassette tape is theft. The same goes for copying TV shows, movies, video games, etc. Most people know that copyright laws limit what is allowed, but many people are genuinely confused about what is and isn't permitted. For example, if I have a CD player in my house, but only a cassette player in my car, am I allowed to make a cassette copy of CDs that I purchased legally so I can listen to them in my car? I am pretty sure I know the answer to that one. I think I am not supposed to do it. The artists and the record company want me to buy two copies of the music. I am also pretty sure that that is probably one of the most frequently violated laws in the country.

     The situation gets trickier once we get into digital copying. If I buy a CD to play in the stereo in my living room, but I would like to listen to it on my computer up in my bedroom, do I have to keep carrying the CD from room to room, or, am I allowed to store a copy of the music on my computer's hard drive? Is that the same or different from copying the CD to a cassette to listen to in my car? Here, I think I know what the record companies would say, but I am not sure that the law is quite so clear on that one.

     We all remember the news about Napster, and how the five big music companies sued them and the case went to court. And most of us know that the corporations won and Napster lost, but who knows the details of that case? Furthermore, one of the biggest companies then bought Napster and is going to use its idea, its technique of file sharing, as a way to market music. But, it's not the same old Napster where users get to hear music for free, but the new fee-for-service Napster in which listeners will have to pay for tracks, instead of paying for the CDs that used to be the main way to market and distribute the tracks.

     So, is it really back to business as usual, or has something fundamental changed?
     Nicholas Negroponte of MIT's Media Lab argues, I think, that there has been a fundamental change, but that we, people, most of us anyway, haven't yet "gotten" the change, a change which some might describe as a veritable sea change. It is the change from atoms to bits. The CDs (and the cassettes and records before them) are atoms. They are material. In the digital age, the music is no longer atoms, but bits. So, when I make a digital copy of my CD onto my hard drive, I haven't copied the atoms of the CD. I haven't made a duplicate material copy that I could then sell on the street, and thereby undercut the rightful owners of their ability to profit from their efforts. However, I have duplicated the bits of information, and thanks to the amazing communication technologies, I can share those bits with one, or two, or a million other users, all in the blink of an eye, thereby not merely undercutting, but thoroughly obliterating the ability of the rightful owners to profit from their efforts.

     The artists, the record companies, their attorneys, and the courts have agreed that making and distributing digital copies of copyrighted material violates the law. However, those laws are the result of efforts to protect the rightful ownership of material that was truly material, that is, made out of atoms. Has all that has changed with invention of digital technologies. For example, to make and distribute a million copies of a record, I would need a million blank records, a recording studio, and a fleet of trucks to distribute them. To make a million copies of a CD, I don't really have to "make" anything. I can simply let the world know that it can access the copy of the CD I put on my hard drive, and the next thing you know, a million users have accessed and duplicated the copy I have. The courts have decided, but not easily, mind you, that this new action is fundamentally the same as the old illegal action, but is it really? Atoms are not bits and bits are not atoms. It is not the CD that has been copied, but the information that the CD contained. Is that just mincing words? I have an inexpensive German Bible on my bookshelf. It contains the same information as a Gutenberg Bible but is worth far less. Is it just the atoms of a Gutenberg Bible, or a Stradivarius violin, or an original Van Gogh oil that makes them worth far more than inexpensive replicas? Is there something fundamentally different between copies of a Bible or a famous painting and copies of a famous musical instrument? After all, the Strad doesn't contain the songs that can be played on it, but both Bibles contain the same information, both paintings contain the same visual image.

     Current copyright law may have other, deeper problems as well, issues that are more fundamental than the difference between atoms and bits, or as Richard Lanham puts it when ridiculing the defenders of the material book as people who have mistaken the box for its contents. How could there be a difference more fundamental than the difference between matter and information? Well, is it true that modern copyright laws can be traced back to the day, not so long ago, when the right to copy, and the right to print, the right even to publish, were rights granted by the king to people he allowed those rights? If so, then copyright law is not just a way to protect the rightful owners' ability to profit from their efforts, but isn't it a way to keep the power to inform and be informed in the hands of those that the king wants to be in charge? Have the changes to copyright law really addressed the fundamental change from monarchy to democracy, or are the laws we have today, the ones that appear to need some tweaking to address digital "piracy" really in need of fundamental rethinking. For decades, or is it centuries, copyright law has used the notion of "intellectual property." But is that a notion that really deserves to the support of the government, the laws, the people? Or, might it be like some of the metaphysical mumbo-jumbo of the Scholastic philosophers and alchemists? Does it lead to Supreme Court judges debating how many digital songs can be fit on the head of a pin? Is copyright itself some sort of dinosaur that need to be reconsidered fundamentally, not just incrementally, in an age when it is quite possible that "information wants to be free"? These are some of the issues I want to wrestle with for a while. Those, and another of the new catch phrases of the digital age, "Content is king." And I want to try to free myself to think deeply about them. Just because a collection of the world's highest paid lawyers have persuaded a collection of what might in fact be the King's Supreme Court have decided that the record companies really can own the content, the so-called "intellectual property" of a record, or book, or game after it has been released into the digital information stream, that does not mean that they really can own it or should be allowed to own it.

Instructor's Comment If you had written this exploratory essay, your instructor might write a response like this to your work.      You have raised some very interesting questions that will make excellent material for an eventual informative or argumentative essay, but you didn't really follow the directions for this exploratory essay. What you have written is not really a narrative, and does not recount any of your research processes. It does do a fairly good job of engaging in or hinting at a dialectical treatment of contraries. But I don't see you engaging with the different sources as the assignment asked. Yes, it's clear that you read Negroponte and Lanham and read about the Napster court case, but the assignment specified that you give an account of those research activities and engage in strong response to the primary sources and "let the reader see you responding." That is the part that is missing here. Instead, it looks like a good first draft of an eventual argument that asserts "copyright law must be fundamentally revised or scrapped entirely." It doesn't look like you are truly wrestling with issue but instead have already decided the position you are going to take in the follow-up assignment. Here you are simply pretending to ask questions, questions to which you have already decided your answer.

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