Today, writing often requires composers to draw upon multiple modes of meaning making. Today's computers and robust networks allow writers to choreograph audio, video, other visual elements, text, and more. This is new. Admittedly, some professionals have been mixing media for years to create advertisements, movies, and CDs, for instance, but access to these technologies is now available in ways we haven't seen before-and multimedia composing rubs against issues of intellectual property in ways we haven't seen before, at least not in the writing classroom. In this manuscript, we address issues of copyright trouble and fair use related to multimedia composing in our current cultural context of media convergence. Specifically, we use a piece of work titled Grand Theft Audio as a launching point to discuss the ways in which copyright trouble is inevitable in multimedia composing. The piece draws on appropriated, remixed, and reconfigured audio, video, text, and images to pose a particular argument about the affordances of media convergence and issues of negotiating copyright permissions. We scaffold our discussion of Grand Theft Audio with the work of scholars including Martine Rife, John Logie, and Lawrence Lessig to push at the ways digital composing is situated in a free use vs. "permission culture" climate.
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