Chapter One:
Stories, narratives and discourses
Because language and life are so intrinsically intertwined it isimportant to understand how narratives influence the reality of our everydaylives. That theory has taken a linguistic turn is argued by many modernliterary theorists, not to mention political and social theorists. LANGUAGE AND THE TEXT As Stanley Fish notes, "we live in a rhetorical world."[3] Our world is framed by language and has meaning becauseof linguistically created social structures. Rosemary Coombe suggests that,not only is the world a product of cultural categories, but the self isconstituted through communication.[4]Narrative, as Hayden White puts it, is a "metacode, a human universal on thebasis of which transcultural messages about the nature of a shared reality canbe transmitted."[5] Narrative is awidespread interdisciplinary theoretical starting point and one which has beencentral to theoretical discussions from hermeneutics to poststructuralism. The linguistic turn in philosophy is about treating the world as a text.Language surrounds our interaction with the world. As Bordeaux points out,language is part of our worldview -- as water is to fish. We can no moreexperience the world absent language than we can experience the fourthdimension from our place in the third. Jean Francois Lyotard remarks that allindividuals are located through language and that language games are "theminimum relation required for society to exist."[7] This ontological approach means we can treatrelationships as textual -- relationships grounded upon linguistic acts. Suchan approach opens a wide variety of activities, which have remained relativelyunexamined, up to exploration into how power works. Texts are books. Texts are poems. Texts are speeches. Texts, in fact, areevents which can be read everywhere. Reading politics as a text, as storiestold which provide citizens with meaning, can provide insights into theproduction of power and how individuals are inspired, included, excluded, andmanipulated. This process, of course, is never clear, linear, or direct.Rather, textual analysis picks at the fragments which attach stories to beliefsand values to narratives. The 'text' is a general term used to describe thatwhich is examined. It comes across as a scientific term for stories. In thisdissertation I have opted to evaluate a variety of texts. These texts includegovernment documents, popular journal articles, and working group papers onintellectual property. Each text plays a role in the construction of a largerintellectual property narrative. Like most theoretical models, the linguistic structure of the world explainsmuch, but cannot explain everything. Is it possible to say we can onlyexperience that which we can discuss through language? Meaning that only whatis consciously articulated exists in writing. Or, as Umberto Eco has recentlyargued, is it possible that the empirical author may often expressrelationships which were not conscious at the time of writing?[8] To put it another way, "writing is above all releasingoneself from external censorship."[9]Language merely attempts to express that which is inexpressible in ourexperience. Patricia Williams is very good at making words express theinexpressible, or at least touch on what is inexpressible. She writes: I sleep fitfully in the New Orleans humidity. I dream that I'm teaching myUniform Commercial Code class. My students are restless and inattentive, boredto death with the sales of chattels. Suddenly, from somewhere deep in mypsyche, polar bears rise. Silent, unbidden, they come to the dissolved wallsof the class-room, the polar bears come padding to hear what this law will meanfor them. It is snowing in their world. Hunching, they settle at the edge ofthe classroom, the walls of the classroom melt in the heated power of theirbreath, their fierce dark eyes are fixed upon me. They hunch and settle andlisten, from beyond-language.[10] As Patricia William's poetic description of the law lets us see, language isoften imprisoning. It inscribes itself upon our bodies and our minds. Itforms us as much as we form it. Certainly, making the argument that humans arelinguistic beings does not exclude a place beyond language from existing.Paradigm shifts could be explained as bringing that which was beyondimagination into the world of the real. Through this process, what was onceinexpressible becomes narratively expressed. I mention the possibility of abeyond language in order to clarify that there are a variety of dimensions tolanguage and narrative. For my purposes, however, it is more than adequate tolook at the structures of narrativity already expressed. I wish to illustratehow these already expressed narratives work to capture us within their languageand ascertain that we do not question their authority and assumptions. STORIES, NARRATIVES AND DISCOURSES It is important to keep in mind that power is capillary, not necessarilyalways totalizing.[11] Stories reflect thecapillary nature of power. Stories provide values which can be incorporatedwithout violence within a worldview. The panopticon internalizes the watchinggaze of the guard within the prisoner. The story internalizes the value systemof a culture within an individual. Stories work within a hermeneutic circle-- they influence us as we influence them. Stories have no meaning outside aculturally inscribed structure. However, these structures change as new voicesare brought into contact with the story. As Barbara Hernstein Smith puts it,"For any particular narrative, there is no single basically basic storysubsisting beneath it but, rather, an unlimited number of other narratives thatcan be constructed in response to it or perceived as related toit (italics in original)."[12] Thus,stories multiply and divide and transform. Smith uses the example of researchdone on the many versions of Cinderella . The researcher feared if shecontinued her work all stories would turn out to be versions ofCinderella.13 For my purposes, it is important to recognizethat intellectual property stories come in variants too. This is the waynarratives work, as Smith argues, "The form and features of any "version" of anarrative will be a function of, among other things, the particular motivesthat elicited it and the particular interests and functions it was designed toserve."[14] In part, this dissertationwill help excavate not only the variants of the copyright story, but illustratewhich interests these variants serve. This narrative circle is in flux, and while stories can change based upontheir interaction with people, looking at what kind of stories are produced isa good method for finding out what types of values are accepted, and importantto any given culture. Additionally, looking at who produces stories can giveus insight into the power relationships of any given culture. Stories can provide alternatives to dominant ideologies too. They can besubversive, radical, and transformative. Stories are intimately related tonarratives. "Stories provide the decorative container for a narrativeof everyday practice."[15] Narratives arewhat stories tell. Narratives "are a version of reality whose acceptability isgoverned by convention and 'narrative necessity' rather than by empiricalverification and logical requiredness, although ironically we have nocompunction about calling stories true or false."[16] Narratives, Bruner argues, are the way we organize ourexperiences and memories.[17] For the mostpart, the terms narrative and story are used interchangeably. Narrative analysis is important for several reasons. First, narratives havean immediate impact on the individuals involved. Narratives often describe theactions of real people. Second, the narrative paradigm uncovers hegemonicprocesses. As Sara Cobb and Janet Rifkin state, "The storytelling metaphorallows the hegemonic processes in discourse to come into focus." Finally, alternative narratives can be used to clarify assumptions within thedominant narrative. The ability to interpret an event is an important aspectof power. The same event, person, action, and so forth can be named and interpreted invery different ways. The naming of an action or event within a particulardiscourse, thus, interpreting the event's meaning and assessing the motivesbehind it, is therefore an act of power. Each naming points to a solution. Multiple stories provide for multiple perspectives, the necessary ingredientfor critical analysis. Multiple stories are already available, however, someare privileged over others and some are not heard at all. The ability to speakone's story is political. Privileging some narratives over others makesstories political and strategic. This dissertation is about intellectualproperty stories and the possible alternative narratives which exist on thefringes. I will be telling these stories in the following chapters. Stories motivate action and articulate value systems. As Eloise Bukernotes, Like words, stories themselves not only preserve, affirm, and pass on culturaltraditions but also introduce complex new ideas and new ways of speaking andthinking about society[21] Stories serve both a conservative and transformative function. They can act topreserve the traditional and to transform it. This tension in the way storieswork has been explained by Bakhtin as a tension between monological anddialogical discourses. There is a constant tension between what Bakhtin callsmonological and dialogical discourses. The sign, according to Bakhtin and Voloshinov, is always an arena of socialstruggle, because it embodies the dialectical history of two contending socialtendencies -- the monologic and the dialogic. Bakhtin often links monologictendencies with the "official" in cultures, which must always contend withdialogic or "carnivalesque" tendencies. This is a sociopolitical opposition,with those in power attempting to give a brute facticity and singular meaningto the sign and to extinguish the "struggle between social value judgmentswhich occurs in it, to make the sign unaccentual."[22] It is the stories produced within this tension which I wish to examine. Wehave dominant stories of property in the traditional copyright story. We alsohave a few emerging stories which aide in decentering the traditional story.This tension appears throughout the dissertation. Cultural categories engageindividuals in a dialogic process which defines identity and individuality inrelation to shared cultural symbols and language.[23] Humans operate as semiotic beings, functioning throughan ongoing dialogue with cultural symbols, signs, and each other. Control ofthe sign limits the dialogue. This same tension is described by MichaelShapiro as one between sovereignty and exchange.[24] A discourse is a more professional, and more abstract term. It pretends to be"scientific," yet as de Certeau has pointed out, narrativity hauntsdiscourse.[25] A discourse is made up ofstories and narratives. A discourse is a certain interpretation of culturalsigns pretending to be the interpretation. A discourse is more than the act ofspeaking, discourse is what is spoken. It also indicates communication -- onediscourses with others. Thus, a discourse has a political, or strategicelement. It too is subject to a tension between the monologic and dialogic. Ultimately, stories, narratives, and discourses are subject to the sametensions and the same descriptions. Typically, stories are considered thosethings which are fictional. Narratives, too, have a fictional element, but anarration can also be one of real events. Discourses, are situated in the realand the 'scientific.' However, as the linguistic frame suggests, the divisionbetween fiction and reality is hardly clear. If all events are interpretationsdependent upon language, then the line between fact and fiction quickly fadesinto interpretation. Despite our efforts to produce 'scientific' discourses,narrative is always present. This leads me to agree with de Certeau: Shouldn't we recognize its (narrativity) scientific legitimacy byassuming that instead of being a remainder that cannot be, or has not yet been,eliminated from discourse, narrativity has a necessary function in it, and thata theory of narration is indissociable from a theory of practices, as itscondition as well as its production. (italics in original)[26] Within such a framework, what is real and what is fictional are blurred. Thisis not to say that political narratives are fictional accounts. Rather,narrativizing history helps us forget that history is constructedlinguistically. Understanding that nothing narrated is ever permanently fixedis a radical step towards providing alternatives to monological discourses. Stories serve as boundary markers. They authorize actions and stake outlimits which cannot be crossed. As de Certeau puts it, The story's first function is to authorize, or more exactly, to found...This founding is precisely the primary role of the story. It opens alegitimate theatre for practical actions. It creates a fieldthat authorizes dangerous and contingent social actions.[27] Authorizing is important for political stories. Telling people what they canand ought to do is an important aspect of storytelling. One last question isimportant: how do stories perform this function? A structuralist approach to stories is outlined by Eloise Buker. She statesthat there are four dimensions to analyzing narratives. They are:understanding the oppositions, the metaphors, the transformations (actions),and the contradictions. We learn about a culture through the oppositions laidout (for example the cultural implications of black/white). We can watch forshifts in meaning by evaluating the metaphors used and how they are used.Transformations are apparent by looking at the values characters seek (whatkind of outcome do they wish). And finally, stories can mediate contradictionsby providing a space in which this tension can work itself out.[28] These structural components of understanding narrative are important tools.However, how stories come to be held in common and how stories can be embracedand define entire groups of people cannot be discerned through a structuralapproach. Robert Scholes agrees, "In language, a play of difference and anecessary order of phenomena are engaged with one another, and what is producedby their interaction cannot properly be reduced to a neat Saussurianformula."[29] A dynamic evaluation of themethods in which political stories work needs to be used. Political storiesare strategic stories. They are stories told in order to make a point. Whileall stories are at one level political in that they inherently incorporatevalue systems, stories which constitute policy making are more explicitlystrategic. These stories must move from a personalized context, through thepolitical process, and be embraced by the general population. Indeed, this isthe process through which political stories emerge. From my work, it seemsthat they begin as personal testimony about harms done and positions taken.These testimonies depend upon already existing stories and identities. Thesestories are embraced in the form of national policy through a process ofabstraction which takes the personal and makes it generally applicable.Finally, the policy story must be embraced by everyone in order to be usefuland thus, what was once a personal story has taken on general characteristicswhich become the basis for 'education' about a certain issue. This educationtells us what is 'good' and 'bad' and how we should act. The result is arhetorical vision. RHETORICAL VISIONS Ernest Bormann developed the theory of rhetorical visions to explain howindividuals come to be part of a discursively shared community identity.Rhetorical visions explain how a narrative becomes common to a group of people.Bormann notes, My purpose is to illuminate how individuals talk with one another about theirhere-and-now concerns until they come to share a common consciousness andcreate a sense of identity and community, how they then use communication toraise the consciousness of inquirers until the latter convert to the newconsciousness, and how they use communication to sustain the converted and keepthem committed to the established vision.[30] This common vision, in Bormann's words is a rhetorical vision -- a collectivelydesigned story which explains reality. Once such a story is developed itenlarges, or is "chained out," to incorporated more people through small groupsettings and mass communicative events. Bormann's model is a narrative model and looks for dramatic elements used toconstruct a commonly shared rhetorical vision.[31] There are several elements which clarify the narrativeprocess of the rhetorical vision. First, are there patterns ofcharacterization, or more simply -- do the same people keep popping up asvillains. Second, are there patterns of dramatic situations and actions, thatis, are the same stories repeated? An important question is raised, "Given allthe possible arrangements and presentations of these events, what is gained andwhat is lost by the arrangement that this text undertakes?"[32] This framework provides the rhetorical critic with aspecific task to fulfill. He states, "Once the rhetorical critics document thepresence of rhetorical visions, communities, and consciousness, they can make ahumanistic evaluation of the quality of the rhetoric and the social realitiesof the people who share the consciousness. A critic needs to evaluate andto judge the discourse and to provide added insight into how it works.[emphasis mine]"[33] A theory of rhetorical visions provides a crucial element in narrativeanalysis. Strategic stories are important because of the impact their contentshave on a more general population. The stories which are the subject of thisdissertation are not fairy tales, they are conglomerations of mini-narrativeswhich loosely construct villains, victims, and good guys. These stories areconstructing the boundaries of intellectual property in an information age.They prescribe action and reward compliance. We are all complicit in this act. READERS, WRITERS, AND AUTHORS There is one more set of relationships which must be written about before wemove to the heart of this dissertation. Authorship should not be taken forgranted. If nothing else, I have reflected upon authorship this year and cometo no conclusions. Do I believe that there is no such thing as originalgenius, that 'originality' is a product of the enlightenment, much as theconcept of progress? Do I believe that the creativity of authorship has moreto do with the cultural context within which the author works and conversationsthe author has than any 'inspired' thought? If I believe this, how do Iaccount for great authors? For great literature? For inspired poetry? Ithink I can critique the notion of authorship by making a critical distinctionbetween authorship and writing. Helene Cixous notes that there is an immensedifference between the author and the book written. As she puts it, We don't know the authors, we read books and we take them for authors. Wethink there must be an analogy or identification between the book and theauthor. But you can be sure there is an immense difference between the authorand the person who wrote; and if you were to meet that person, it would besomeone else.[34] These words are important. Any theory of authorship must also have a theory ofwriting, for the two are very different. What Cixous so eloquently speaks ofis writing -- the expression of thoughts. Writing for her, and for manyothers, is not only a creative experience, but a soul searching, death defyingexperience which cannot be bound into the human form of the author. A writer has no children; I have no children when I write. When I write Iescape myself, I uproot myself, I am a virgin; I leave from within my own houseand I don't return. The moment I pick up my pen -- magical gesture -- I forgetall the people I love; an hour later they are not born and I have never knownthem.[35] This particular viewpoint speaks to the magical and creative in everyone. Itspeaks to the power of writing, of 'literature,' and of creativity. Cixious isspeaking of what Trinh Minh-Ha has called body-writing, or writing from thebody. Moreover, more and more women see writing as the place of change, wherethe possibility of transforming social and cultural structures is offered.Going beyond the convention Presence-God-Author and feeling the urgency of adecentralizing movement, they take up speech not to identify it with themselvesor to possess it, but to deliver it from its enslavement to mastery. Writing, as explained by Cixious and Minh-Ha is much different from authorship.Writing is to express and exchange. Authorship is to own and control. Muchlike putting a title on a work to describe its contents, an author describesits ownership. The distinction between writing and authorship is criticalbecause it produces very different results. As Mike Shapiro notes, "Authors are, therefore, sovereignty functions, amongother things."[37] Authors are politicalin that they help cement ownership. Authors are the product of an economicsystem, not the product of creative minds. The designation of an individualauthor who can take credit for any given work is critical to a functioningcopyright law. The author also acts as a boundary for the text. Foucault'sseminal essay "What is an Author?" sheds some light upon the author-function. We can conclude, that, unlike a proper name, which moves from the interior of adiscourse to the real person outside who produced it, the name of the authorremains at the contours of texts -- separating one from the other, definingtheir form, and characterizing their mode of existence.[38] In taking this approach, the sovereignty impulse of authorship becomes clear.Foucault elaborates this point by arguing that the function of the author is to"characterize the existence, circulation, and operation of certain discoursesin our society."[39] In modernity, theauthor-work relation is institutionalized. Mark Rose explains: The author and the work. The autonomous creator and the distinct literaryobject, unitary, closed, and caught up in relations of ownership. Theauthor-work relation is embedded in library catalogues, the indexes of standardliterary histories, and such basic reference tools as Books in Print.It is pervasive in our educational system, where students are typically taughtfrom the canon of major works by major authors. It is also institutionalizedin our system of marketing cultural products.[40] The author then, serves a function not directly related to creativity. Theauthor is both a boundary and a controlling mechanism. The author helpscontrol a system of book production. 'Literature' is created through such asystem where some authors should be read and some ignored. While theauthor-function is all pervasive in society, it obscures several importantaspects of creativity. First, the author-function obscures the interconnectedness of texts. Thereader is also a writer, is also inspired by the idea. The reader uses otherwriting as a springboard. It is safe to say that nobody creates in a vacuum.We are all dependent upon the ideas of others. Martha Woodmansee, workingwithin the Foucaultian framework, touches upon this critical aspect ofauthorship. She states, In their recent study of professional writing practices, Andrea Lunsford andLisa Ede have found that most of the writing that goes on today is in factcollaborative. Indeed, one comes away from their investigation of how peopleactually write in business, government, industry, the sciences and socialsciences with the impression that there is but one last bastion of solitaryorigination: the arts and humanities. What gives their study such urgency isthe fact that, this powerful collaborative trend notwithstanding, theassumption that writing is inherently and necessarily a solitary, individualact still informs both the theory and practice of the teaching of writing. The notion of authorship, an authorizing and proprietary gesture, obscures thistrend in writing. There is also no way to accommodate collaborative writingwithin a property system designed to protect the individual author. Thus, thesystem is biased towards a specific notion of author -- the individualproprietary author. Authorship obscures the fact that writing has nothing to do with bookproduction. Authors can be many types of people. Authors can be highlyeducated individuals writing the most profound 'literary' novel of the century.Authors can also be assembly line production workers who recycle the same plotin order to produce more 'pulp' fiction. Authors, in a modern sense, are thosewho make a living from their creative work. They are paid to produce. Thus,authorship as a proprietary system is in need of protection. Copyright emergesas a means to protect the text which has been marked by an author and thusstands apart from all other texts. Rose makes the link between this notion ofauthorship and copyright. No institutional embodiment of the author-work relation, however, is morefundamental than copyright, which not only makes possible the profitablemanufacture and distribution of books, films, and other commodities but also,by endowing it with legal reality, helps to produce and affirm the veryidentity of the author as author.[42] This endowment of the author as author has serious real-world impacts to whichthe dissertation is addressed. The author-function has very little to do withwriting and everything to do with authorship. The author-function isreinforced by the authorizing function, meaning privilege is given to someinterpretations (by professionals) and not to others. A text is given aboundary by its author and title and an interpretaion by experts. This is inpart the concept of the discourse network established by Friedrich Kitler. The function of the author tends to obscure the process of writing. Ifwriting can be spoken of as the poetic experience felt by Helen Cixous, thenwhat is authorship? Simply put, it is a method through which writing can beharnessed and owned. As Foucault writes, "A text has an inaugurative valueprecisely because it is the work of a particular author, and our returns areconditioned by this knowledge."[44] I havefound a way to preserve what I see as valuable in the words of Helene Cixousand provide a substantive critique of the author-function. For her, the mostpowerful book, the abominable book, is that which has no author. The imund book is the book without an author. It is the book written with usaboard, though not with us at the steering wheel. It is the book that makes usexperience a kind of dying, that drops the self, the speculating self, thespeculating clever "I."[45] Such a book may have hundreds of 'authors,' or just one. However, the authoris not the important part, what the text separated from the author can do forus is what is valuable. In attempting to distinguish the author-function from writing I do not wish tomove too far into a romanticization of writing. While Cixious' words arepoetic and enrapturing, it is important to bring ourselves back to earth.Writing itself, while possibly being all that Cixious makes it out to be, isstill a manifestation of historical exactitudes. It must be contextualized asoccurring within a specific frame, and emerging from the culture in which it isproduced. What must be brought from the discussion of writing and authorshipis that there are many diverse facets to authorial personalities. There arethe aesthetic/creative facets which produce writing; there are the legal facetswhich produce copyrights; and there are the author-function facets whichproduce boundaries.[46] In moderndiscourses the author-function aspect of the authorial personality are used insuch a manner as to replace the aesthetic/creative aspects and in the processsolidify ownership as a method of dealing with literary work. Literary work itself, however, must also be deconstructed. 'Literature' ascreative emerges out of the Romantic period. Romanticism found that the"literary work itself comes to be seen as a mysterious organic unity." The author is so embedded in our thought processes that we look to the authoras owner instead of looking behind the role of authorship to the production ofdiscourses in society. The author becomes the boundary of a text, "separatingone from the other, defining their form, and characterizing their mode ofexistence."[49] Additionally, centeringthe author changes the focus from what is written to who writes it. Thischange takes us further from the process of writing described by Cixous.Foucault's analysis suggests that the text is not a stable fixed entity, but ismade so through the author-function. The lack of a stable text is alsoreflected upon in the works of many a theorist working in literary theory andcomputer science.[50] The distinction between authorship and writing is clear. However, neitherexists without the reader. Reading, is of course, more clearly linked withwriting. One reads what is written. There is great debate about the functionof the reader. The reader interrupts the text with thoughts of their own. Newwriting is premised upon the ideas found in other work. What is coming to becalled 'hypertext' in our technological society has always existed. However,while it exists, it is refused acknowledgment because it defies the notion ofownership implied by authorship. Thus, reading and writing intertwine towardsinfinity while authorship and reading go nowhere. The process of citationindicates both tendencies within this interrelationship. Citation is the actof recognizing whom one draws ones thoughts from. It keeps the boundariesbetween thine and mine secure. At the same time, however, it implicitlyrecognizes that one does not have ideas emerge fully conceived from the air.The act of reading, if we allow ourselves to read reflexively, will also showhow interconnected our ideas really are. I spend so much time talking about authorship because it is critical tointellectual property laws. Without a clear 'owner' it is difficult tounderstand how one would control the exchange of information. Theauthor-function was originally designed so the English Crown could keep trackof who was saying seditious things. Today, it plays the function of policingthe proprietary boundaries of cultural production. We cannot talk aboutcopyright law without also talking about authorship. However, authorship isnot the stable uni-dimensional concept the law would have it be. Authorship iscomplex and fraught with tension. How authorship is intertwined withintellectual property is the subject of this dissertation. The way I employ narrative begins with the understanding of narrative outlinedhere and the more general comments made in the Introduction. I would assertthat a powerful narrative has been created in the form of copyright law. It isa narrative, as described in the next chapter, which was crafted with thebenefit of a specific group of individuals in mind, and has come to be acceptedas the natural way of protecting written work. Within this larger narrativethere are also identity producing functions which involve us all. Thus, notonly is a way of protecting property described in the copyright narrative, butwho is a criminal, what constitutes criminal activity, and how we as everydayAmericans should behave in an information age. Thus, the narrative not onlyimpacts policy, but how we relate to each other and written work. Identitiesnot of our own construction are used to assert a form of ownership overcreative work and I would like to illustrate the part narrative plays. CONVERGENCES The preceding pages have attempted to outline the dimensions of narrativetheory and the multiple perspectives on authorship and writing, texts, andtextuality. This section attempts to illustrate how this information will beused. To begin, the remainder of this dissertation outlines the narratives ofintellectual property. Intellectual property is a sovereignty discourse. Thetension between sovereignty and exchange is outlined by Michael Shapiro. The opposition between flows of exchange and the inhibitions of sovereignty isoriented around issues of selfhood and location and consequently involves anemphasis either on ownership and the maintenance of authority and control or onreciprocity, substitutability, and the relaxation of control in order toproduce expanded domains in which things can circulate.[51] The sovereignty-exchange dynamic is an important conceptual tool for thisdissertation. As Shapiro notes, sovereignty systems focus on ownership andmaintenance but of course have elements of exchange. Exchange systems tend tofocus on circulation, but also have elements of sovereignty. Problems arise insovereignty systems when tendencies towards greater exchange disrupt theauthority of the status quo. Producing sovereignty models involves a narrativeprocess: "The process of asserting or making sovereignty models, as well asthat of challenging them, involves active, interpretive struggles." This dissertation outlines the multifaceted stories told about intellectualproperty as they relate to computer technology. I want to illustrate how thenarrative process produces a discourse on copyright which is used toincorporate new forms of "literary" work within its folds. In contrast, I wantto also illustrate the countervailing discourses which work to disrupt thisprocess. Ultimately, I am discussing narratives as they relate to works ofauthorship and thus need a grounding in both areas. There are several layers to the discourse of copyright and my narration ofthat discourse. First, there are individual stories and accounts. Second,there is the combination of all the possible narratives about copyrightregardless of their contradictory nature which combine to form a morecomprehensive picture. Third, there is my interpretation of these stories andaccounts -- the narrative frame I introduce to the subject. All these levelswork together to construct "reality." As Fred M. Frohock notes, "The highertruth is that no single narrative can express and overriding truth." In working through the layers of narrative I wish to employ some very basictactics. First, I want to document the types of stories which are being toldabout intellectual property. Each chapter discusses different stories, all ofwhich combine into an overarching view of copyright. Second, I want to provideinformation on who is providing these stories. These first two tactics helpuncover the power relationships in the story telling process and who isresponsible for the reality we are experiences. Third, it is informative tounderstand who the villains of these stories might be. Villains help providedramatic action as well as inform us of the appropriateness of our behavior.Fourth, I wish to understand how the author and originality functions in thesestories. In copyright stories, the author is hero, or at least that which mustbe rescued. How creativity, originality, and authorship are defined isimportant for understanding stories about copyright. This short outline of how I will introduce the stories of copyright adheres tode Certeau's notion of how stories function. He states, By considering the role of stories in delimitation, one can see that theprimary function is to authorize the establishment, displacement ortranscendence of limits, and as a consequence, to set in opposition, within theclosed field of discourse, two movements that intersect (setting andtransgressing limits) in such a way as to make the story a sort of "crossword"decoding stencil (a dynamic partitioning of space) whose essential narrativefigures seem to be the frontier and the bridge.54 Stories are about limits and there is no better example of this than copyrightstories. My strategy is both to tell a story and to illuminate the stories alreadytold. I cannot exit from the narrative, but I can stand critical of it. Myproject is inspired by a humanist desire to write stories which serve a greaternumber of people. I accept the linguistic framework I seem to find myself in.I understand the power of the narrative and I hope to point out how these workin society. Stanley Fish notes, "Change is produced when a vocabulary takes hold to theextent that its ways of elaborating the world become normative and areunreflectively asserted in everyday practices... change just creeps up on acommunity as a vocabulary makes its unsystematic way into its every corner."