Martine Courant Rife, WIDE Research Assistant, to Present at CATTW in Toronto

Martine Rife will present her paper entitled "The Impossibility of Knowledge-Making as Local Practice: Differing Canadian-US Law & Policy on P2P Technology" on Tuesday, May 30th, 2006. From the abstract: Writing as knowledge is increasingly subject to transfer within globalized information streams (Jessop, 1999; Block, 2004; Grabill, 2005) and thus international intellectual property (IP) regimes. It is crucial that technical communicators address the civic, policy, and legal issues of globalization (Huckin, 2002) because how these information streams are legislated and controlled impacts our practices in localized settings. Protection for technical communicators’ inventions and research is needed, as is dissemination of knowledge, especially for technical writing teachers.

Digital environments distribute knowledge globally; no homogenous international IP regime exists that governs this distribution. Currently, technical communicators’ ability to locally contextualize digital distribution of writing may not be possible. As a way to disseminate information, P2P file sharing is an alternative to market-based proprietary control of distribution and offers possibilities to revolutionize information exchange. The US increasingly favors the private sector, or protection; meanwhile Canada offers up interesting possibilities for properly balancing the interests of protecting invention and the educator’s need for knowledge. US-Canadian differences on P2P typify how high-protection IP rules may undermine themselves and instead cause inventive activities to shift from one jurisdiction to another. In order to illustrate this phenomenon, the speaker describes two differing law & policy approaches, Canadian and US, on P2P file sharing technologies, and posits a model for knowledge-making practice that cannot exist outside a theory of globalization. Understanding how international IP law may impact our ability as technical communicators, researchers, and teachers to share, to invent, is essential in our increasingly globalized knowledge economy.