Master of Arts, The Ohio State University, 2007, Graduate School

Committee: Not Provided (Other) Subjects:

Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.), Bowling Green State University, 2013, Media and Communication

Copyright is in theory a neutral legal instrument, but in practice copyright functions as an ideological tool. The value of creative content in culture vacillates between the rhetorical poles of progress and profit within copyright law. This study is an ideographic rhetorical critique of copyright. Ideographs are rhetorical containers of ideology that publics use to define various aspects of culture. Some ideographs are contained within the dialogue of a topic. I argue five terms that make up the ideographic grammar of copyright: public domain, fair use, authorship, ownership, and piracy. The public domain is the space where copyrighted material enters when the term of protection expires. The public domain expresses the ideology that creative material belongs to the people who consume content. Fair use is the free speech exception to copyright law that allows for certain types of infringement. Fair Use is the ideology in which the use of creative work belonging to others must be fairly represented. Authorship is how an author creates content and how an audience consumes it. Authorship is an ideology focused on progress towards the process of creating content as motivated by an author. The question at the center of authorship is who controls content: the author or the public. Ownership takes the question of authorship one-step further by invoking material property. Ownership is the embodiment of the idea that management, control, and profit of copyright are more valuable than original creation. The Corporate Public is focused on ownership of content, because ownership is a legal condition of property where a person or group can profit. Piracy, which appears most often in any discussion of copyright law, is an intentional theft of copyrighted work(s). Piracy is a battleground between content theft and the people who publicly resist copyright.

Committee: Michael Butterworth Ph.D (Advisor); Victoria Ekstrand Ph.D (Committee Member); Joshua Atkinson Ph.D (Committee Member); Kristen Rudisill Ph.D (Committee Member) Subjects: Communication; Law; Rhetoric

Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.), Bowling Green State University, 2008, Communication Studies

The purpose of this dissertation project was to explore the Chinese cultural perceptions of copyright and the Chinese historical understanding and social practices of innovation, fair use, and the public domain so as to provide a grass-roots approach to studying the recurring U.S-China copyright disputes. Guided by the theoretical frameworks of the theory of reasoned action, strategic and tactical resistance, and hegemony as well as Hofstede's individualism-collectivism cultural dimension, the researcher has conducted 45 in-depth interviews of Chinese copyright holders and consumers for data collection and used hermeneutics and thematic analysis to examine the data. The research findings are as follows: (I) Just a small number of the participants, who are lawyers, editors, and authors, offered complete and insightful understanding of the concepts under discussion while the majority who are university teachers, college and high school students, as well as business people and farmers demonstrated very vague understanding of the concepts. (II) Copyright piracy is so common in China that it is hard not to follow the stream. (III) As for the reasons for piracy, the study indicated that (i) the Chinese copyright legal system lacks a matching cultural environment; (ii) the levels of Chinese income and copyright awareness call for adjusted U.S. strategies of intellectual property rights (IPR) and flexible prices of intellectual property (IP) products at the Chinese market; and (iii) at odds with the modern concept of copyright are the Chinese tradition of sharing with one another, taking from others and the public without any sense of guilt, and disfavoring criminal litigation of copyright infringement as a result of the Confucian pursuit of social harmony. (IV) To awaken and enhance the national awareness of copyright protection in China, the study showed that: (i) if the government is really serious about copyright piracy, ordinary people will also take copyright protecti (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Oliver Boyd-Barrett PhD (Committee Chair); Dominic Catalano PhD (Committee Member); Victoria Ekstrand PhD (Committee Member); Canchu Lin PhD (Committee Member) Subjects: Communication; International Relations; Organizational Behavior