Writerly Rights

This semester, I was invited to present in the class geared toward creating the annual issue of the student literary and arts journal at UCCS, riverrun. I was given free rein to cover whatever I thought the students should know, and I took the opportunity to do a class I've been hoping to take for a test drive: IS! THAT! FAIR! USE!

Credit where credit is due to Michele Jennings of Ohio University for this idea. The core concept for this class was the rights the students now had as artists to the work they created for riverrun and the rights they will have in the future as creators if they continue down this road. We cover copyright, fair use, and moral rights in this class through the lens of actual cases that exemplify how messy these rights can get. 

​While I am the English subject librarian, I am also the government information subject librarian. We started with the actual text of 17 USC that covers the definitions of copyright and fair use. To unpack and put into practice these ideas, I introduced Rogers v. Koons and Cariou v. Prince as examples. I presented the facts of the former, emphasizing the way the four-factor test is used to determine whether or not someone else's IP has been reused ethically, and then had the students argue both sides of the latter. I particularly like Cariou v. Prince because the Southern District of New York's decision that Prince's repurposing of Cariou's photos was not fair use is overturned by the Second Circuit, so everyone gets to be right.

I then reframed copyright to ask what's missing from these rights. Fundamentally, copyright is about economic rights. Moral rights, i.e. the right to the integrity of your work, are missing. We return to 17 USC before going through the same process. I went through the facts and decision in Wojnarowicz v. American Family Association, and then the students got to argue both sides in Kelley v. Chicago Park District. 

Finally, after exploring their rights as artists, we looked at an example publishing contract to see what rights they could retain in publishing and what rights they may have to turn over. 

Check out the Slides

What worked: Overall this was a really successful class. I had to chase the students out of the library classroom because they wanted to continue the conversation among themselves.
What didn't: The timing for this class wasn't ideal; the 2022 issue of riverrun had already gone to print so some of this information would have been more useful if delivered a few weeks earlier.
What I'd Change: I will probably swap Kelley and Wojnarowicz in terms of which one I present and which one they argue. The latter case is more publication oriented, so it's probably more relevant to the literary journal.​ I may also include a DMCA case example since the journal is published online as well as in print.