IntroductionA Copyleft ManifestoIn Memory of Ty Herrington

This webtext considers how educational technology platforms challenge student authorship and ownership, focusing on three platforms: Turnitin, Twitter, and Canvas. These platforms represent a range of platform types—a plagiarism detection system, a social media platform, and a learning management system—and support an assortment of composing practices and platform-based interactions that give rise to tensions in authorship.

This article explains the Constitution's intellectual property provision and its goals, then deconstructs the Supreme Court's decision in Eldred v. Ashcroft as a means to unravel the pieces in the complex relationship among the constitutional provision, the First Amendment, and copyright. The article then considers how an understanding of the relationship of these elements can be helpful for considering the positions of technical communicators as both users and producers of intellectual products.