Who owns what and how do they get paid?

Johnson-Eiola's Understanding Composition as Articulation was an enlightening article on articulation and symbolic-analytic texts in the postmodern sense.  I find that I do this ALL the time.  It seems like such an efficient way to validate your arguments in a discourse community.  The methods hyper-text allows for a reconstruction from linear to an amalgamation of links and sources from other sites.  So many times I have done this through social media sites such as facebook.  Take a link and spin it, as if I had thought of this all along as my own original idea. OR even go so far as to take links out of context to reinforce my argument, although those texts in their original context may argue against my own polemic.   I do this to attract an audience and the audience that most often than not responds is the one that understands the presuppositions, context, and other texts I am referring to (James E. Porter). All the while the articles I post on my page are not my own creative intellectual property, although I may put my own creative spin or commentary/opinion as a headliner to the information (such as in the case Matthew Bender v West Publishing except I am not trying to sell it as my own).  I may argue that my arrangement is creative, but could I really copyright that and publish it without infringing on the copyrights of the documents i have arranged around? 

This type of intertextuality is the norm and is the basis for all knowledge.  Books are based on books, which are based on books, which are based on....books.  Maybe the exception is the bible which is an account of Divine will.  The bible itself is a collection of books but those books are based on the word of God...any who maybe i'm getting myself in too deep of a point I may not be able to back up, so i will digress. As students we are given these grand expectations to understand Emerson and more or less to write like he did.  I am sure he drew on the great classics as did all others in his discourse community of his time as we do today. Yet we truly are freshman and need to cite, refer, and allude to these other peoples ideas.  Maybe this is why I didn't enjoy the class room setting in highschool, we learned about all these people and these books that seemed so foreign to someone who is bombarded with television, internet, video games, and other mind diverting attention grabbing, and shortening, modalities.  We were being taught to think for ourselves by learning about all "other" peoples ideas, this didn't make sense to me initially.  It was only after going back to college after a break in freshman year that I was able to understand the importance of intertextuality and one's dependence in the scholarly academic setting to be able to be aware of, allude to, and reformulate the writings and ideas of others.


In order to be successful in the college academia, one must subject the self a seemingly endless barage of ideas and arguments from people you never knew.

It is truly interesting to examine how Intellectual Property (IP) works in terms of copyrights and capitalism.  What distinguishes creative writing these days as an original idea is as rare a sighting as a do-do bird now-a-days?  When Johnson-Eiola mention, "the collection of pre-existing content, even relatively fine-grained and factual content such as sporting events scores, is increasingly considered to be a creative act, at least in terms of legal and financial aspects.", I was intitally blown away.  Sporting event scores are a creative act???!!!! I guess the news paper has to make money some how but that to me seems ridiculous being able to copyright facts such as those.  While information is not free there is a certain extent of limitation that occurs if this is so.  Such as distribution and who gets access (those with money).  But at the same time info is valued and moving information as a commodity is an economic boon in an economy that sells fragments and portions of texts.  People must make a profit some how. 

What really grinds my gears, moving away from literary analysis, is the copyright or patents of Genes, such as what Monsanto does.  Splicing a virus and a and corn, by taking genes from a virus and implanting them in mutliple corn plants and taking the ones that survive and cloning them, therefore patenting corn that produces it's own pesticide in the field and even possibly inside your intestines.  I mean what kind of alchemy is this?  And to say you are allowed to copyright this hideous franken-corn is like saying you can pantent life because you altered it in a creative way.  Will slavery resurface if I am allowed to patent a process that clones people and therefore own the clones as intellectual property and bid them to do my will?  HAH! maybe that is a little too far out, but do you get my point?  Where is the line drawn in terms of copyrighting or patenting something like genetic modification?  With living entities, and possibly human genetic engineering in the future?  Will there be a company that patents a process or a portion of genomes to use in baby designing so that you can implant w/e genes, blue eyes, black hair, atheleticism, you want in the child you will birth?  This is technically what Monsanto does with corn, soy, sugar beets, and canola, giving them a stranglehold on the world food supply by filing lawsuits against people who, through no fault of their own, end up with some monsanto crops growing in their fields and therefore face endless litigation by Monsanto's arsenal of lawyers meant to bleed your funds.  The same goes for seed sellers.  Where is the humanity in this?  Does this peeve any one else off or am I on an island here?