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n the years since the Napster decision, there has been much discussion in the fields that comprise English studies and legal studies about the language we use to discuss intellectual property in digital spaces. In the highly contested landscape of contemporary copyright, words are weighted with claims to not just legitimacy but fundamental truths. Cultural property is or isn't equivalent to physical property (Lunsford; Stearns; Yen). It might or might not be considered part of an intellectual commons or public domain that can or can't be owned in tradi- tional ways (Boyle; Cohen; Lessig). Framing the debates as pure war was a common Valenti era rhetorical move (Litman; Logie, "Copyright Cold War"). Since the end of the seventeenth century, intellectual property has been ransacked by pirates or redistributed by thieves (Logie, Peers, Pirates, and Persuasion-; Reyman; St. Clair).
The cultural work that these metaphors perform is of particular interest to those of us who study rhetorical aspects of language, constructions of authorship, the complexities of intellectual property, and cultural understandings of the labor of writing and collaboration. The far-reaching implications of intellectual property arguments extend beyond scholarly analysis and the recent courtroom arguments of A&M Records, Inc. v. Napster, Inc.; Authors Guild v. Google; or Patrick Cariou v. Richard Prince.1 At each turn, the chosen terminology marks the conversation with not just ethos and emphasis but the mores of our era and culture. They drive a com- monsense notion of what Mark Rose has called "the unconscious of copyright law" ("Copyright and Its Metaphors" 9). "The issue is not truth so much as persuasion," he writes. "A persuasive solution is one that works because it tells us what we already know" (10). By examining these "accepted truths," Jessica Reyman argues, "a study of the rhetorical frameworks can show how these statements arise out of particular conditions of a political and cultural context in place of other possible statements" (23). In the Western early twenty-first century, piracy and theft are integral to countless mundane rhetorical interactions that touch on intellectual property, as Reyman demonstrates in her discussion of the MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America) copyright warnings shown on DVDs distributed in the United States and Europe (67-72). These criminalized views of reuse permeate our everyday...