We’ve talked about adaptation quite a bit this semester. We’ve also learned how to use citations as we write about adaptations. But what if we wanted to create an adaptation, rather than just writing about one? What if instead of offering commentary or criticism of a creative work that already exists, we want to adapt it? What would that look like? In what follows, I contrast the art of citation with the art of adaptation. And I explain how you can do both.
The Art of Citation
If I’ve been successful so far in the semester, I’ve convinced you to appreciate the art of citation. It can be tricky to learn how to cite your sources, but it’s a beautiful way to signal to your reader that your ideas are in conversation with the ideas of writers who came before you. In academic writing especially, we make a very clear distinction between the work of others and our own original ideas and expressions. We introduce our sources using well-established citation styles like MLA, APA, and Chicago so our readers can find and explore them in full. We think carefully about whether to quote a source directly or paraphrase their work (or some combination of the two). We also include in-text citations to clearly distinguish our own original contributions from the ideas and specific language of writers who have come before us. As a teacher (and a reader more generally), I really appreciate citations because of this. They introduce me to new sources the writer has found useful and help me understand how writers are interpreting those sources.
Because citations are fundamental to writers clearly presenting what is distinct about their work, they take care with citations so they can take full credit for their own original ideas and expressions. As you’ll see with the image slider below, it would be pretty challenging to tell that ideas from J. Ellen Gainor weren’t my own without my introduction, quotation marks, and in-text citation:
In the version with clear citations, I am able to distinguish my own ideas from the theatre scholar whose ideas I’m working with. Without the citations, it seems like her ideas are my own (plagiarism).
When you’re first learning how to produce academic writing, it can be easy to make a citation error, perhaps forgetting to include an in-text citation when you’ve paraphrased an idea from someone else or forgetting to surround a direct quotation with quotation marks. This course is designed to help you find writing practices so you don’t forget those things, since it can give the impression that you are the creator of something that was actually created by someone else. Plagiarism in first-year writing courses usually occurs because of a mistake. The important thing to note, though, is that citations are about WAY more than just avoiding plagiarism. Citations celebrate the fact that creative works emerge from and interact with other creative works.
I should note that citation is not only used to indicate that you’re drawing on the original ideas of others. Sometimes, citations are used to link to a reliable source when you are referring to a fact that may or may not be in dispute. When most reasonable people would agree about the thing you’re discussing, you can offer citations that your reader could use to learn more if they don’t have a solid understanding of that idea. It’s not so much about acknowledging the single source for an idea or a particular turn of phrase, but finding the most reputable or the most accessible explanation for something you’re mentioning in passing.
The Art of Adaptation
When I cite another writer’s original ideas or expressions, they remain fixed and I build on them. Perhaps I change the way people think about the idea that I’ve cited because of what I say about it, but I don’t fundamentally change what it is.
But we’ve just been studying how writers create adaptations of previous texts, copying elements of plot, character, and dialogue. Is this plagiarism?
No, because these writers were creating adaptations. The process of creating an adaptation (or a derivative) is referred to in many ways: Adapting, sampling, remixing, etc. One creates an adaptation by copying what has come before and changing it to make a new creative work. It’s not the same as citing because the point is to create something new. The adapted thing might be a fictional story, but it could really be any creative work.
When I’m citing a text, whether I’m quoting or paraphrasing, I am doing my best to accurately represent what it says so I can say something about it. I wouldn’t, in this context, change the language of that text to make it more accurately represent what I want it to say. That would misrepresent the author/s. Let’s try an example:
If I wanted to write a piece of commentary on The United States Declaration of Independence, I would find the relevant sections and copy them or paraphrase them before offering my own original ideas about them. But if I were to take the Declaration of Independence, copy the exact language, and change a little bit of it to fix something that I think has done damage to the country, I would be adapting that document. Authors make moves like this all the time when writing dystopian or utopian fiction, and political leaders might also do this when founding a system of government on a model they admire. And that would be called adaptation. If someone wanted to write commentary on the actual document, they would need to do their best to represent what it actually says.
Citations vs. Attribution Statements
As you might already be thinking, citations would be very tricky in an adaptation. You might want to use huge chunks of the thing you’re adapting with huge chunks of other things, and it can be really hard to keep track of where everything comes from when you’re remixing. Instead of citations, then, adapters use a process of attribution to make it clear what creative works they have drawn on when creating their adapted work. Though it looks different, it’s still very important to make it clear that the work builds on the work of others and to give clear credit to those creators.
Oh, and one more thing. This is important. You can’t adapt just anything. You can quote or paraphrase copyrighted material for the purposes of criticism or commentary (this is an exception to copyright called “fair use”), but you technically can’t adapt copyrighted material without the permission of the copyright holder. I’ll discuss this more below.
So, how do I know if something is copyrighted?
To answer this, I’m going to put an entire section from another publication into this page. What follows is taken directly from the section, “Copyright Basics,” from the Creative Commons Creative Commons Certificate for Educators, Academic Librarians and GLAM (by copying and pasting this into this page, I am essentially adapting/remixing that earlier work for my own purposes)
You might not realize it, but copyright law is as integral to your daily life as local traffic laws. Copyright is the area of law that limits how others may access and use the original works of authors (or creators, as we often call them) — works spanning the spectrum from novels and operas, corporate manuals, archives, cat videos, to scribbles on a napkin.
There are some important fundamentals you need to be aware of regarding what is copyrightable, as well as who controls the rights and can grant permission to reuse a copyrighted work.
1. **Copyright grants a set of exclusive rights** to copyright owners, which means that no one else can copy, distribute, publicly perform, adapt, or do almost anything else other than simply view or read the work without permission of the copyright holder.
2. **Copyright grants rights to literary and artistic works that are _original_**. Copyright is available to everything from paintings to blog posts, but all works must meet a certain standard of originality to warrant copyright. Different countries frame the test in different ways, but it is often either considered a test of originality or authorial presence. Generally speaking, this means the work must have been a creation of its creator and not copied from another work.
3. Copyright **does not protect facts or ideas** themselves, only the expression of those facts or ideas. The difference between an idea and the expression of that idea can be tricky, but it’s also quite important to understand. While copyright law gives creators control over their expression of an idea, it does not allow the copyright holder to own or exclusively control the idea itself.
4. As a general rule, copyright is **automatic** the moment a work is created, though some countries require that the work be fixed in a tangible medium before granting copyright. In countries that require fixation, such as the United States, you do not have a copyright until you type your poem, record a song, or otherwise capture your work in a fixed form. While registration with the local copyright office often confers certain benefits to the copyright holder and allows you to record your authorship officially, registration is not required to gain copyright protection.
5. Copyright protection **lasts a long time**. More on this later, but for now it’s enough to know that copyright lasts a long time, often many decades after the creator dies.
6. **Copyright protection is balanced against other public interests**. The rights granted to copyright owners may be considered against other public interests, such as freedom of expression rights, the right to access information, and the needs of people with disabilities. There are occasions when copyright protections may be limited to serve the public interest.
Although copyright laws vary from country to country, there are many commonalities among copyright laws globally. This is largely due to international treaties.
Note: The combination of very long terms with automatic protection has created a massive amount of “orphan works” — copyrighted works for which the copyright holder is unknown or impossible to locate.
What’s the difference between copyright violation and plagiarism?
Here again I’m going to include an entire section of the FAQ page for the Creative Commons website because I think they say it best.
Plagiarism involves the copying of someone else’s creation or ideas and passing them off as one’s own without attribution to the original author. Plagiarism is generally a matter of ethics and is dealt with primarily through social norms, ethics policies, academic standards, and codes of conduct. Plagiarism will usually give rise to professional or academic sanctions, and will not necessarily be the subject of legal proceedings.
Copyright infringement is a matter of law and will give rise to legal sanctions. An action may be considered plagiarism but not copyright infringement and vice versa, or both at the same time. For example, copying part of a text and not crediting the author could be considered plagiarism in an academic context, but not copyright infringement if the reproduction is allowed under an exception or if the text is in the public domain (subject to the application of moral rights). Conversely, copying part of a text without authorization and without benefiting from an exception but with correctly crediting the author could be copyright infringement but not plagiarism.
If I can adapt the Declaration of Independence, does that also mean I can also adapt Moana? Technically, one would need a license from Disney to adapt Moana because it is still under copyright (The Declaration of Independence is in the public domain). Some people do adapt copyrighted works, though, arguing that their work is protected under fair use. Take, for example, the long tradition of fanvids or vidding. This is a challenging space for creative work, as these creators are often subject to claims of copyright infringement (but many working in this space relish the challenge!).
Enter Creative Commons, for creators who don’t really want to reserve all rights to their work
There are a lot of people who publish their work on the Internet who actually want others to reuse and remix the things they’ve created. Inspired by the broader open source movement (and frustration that the duration of copyright was being extended to benefit corporations), a group of Intellectual Property lawyers, technologists and activists worked together to establish creative commons licenses, which helps creators easily give users permission to revise, reuse, remix, retain, and redistribute what they have created (these are called the 5 Rs). Folks using creative commons licenses celebrate the fact that our culture is made richer by copying and remixing what has come before, as illustrated by this video featuring many of the founding members of the creative commons:
A Shared Culture from Creative Commons on Vimeo.
This page is a remix: you can remix it further!
This page remixes content from resources created by other educators. I can do this because those educators put a creative commons license on their work. In short, the creative commons licenses they put on their work gives me permission to include as much of that material as I want as long as I give the creators credit. Imagine that you are tasked with teaching future students of this course about the relationship between citation and adaptation. In Your Doc, you can practice the art of adaptation by creating a brief adaptation of this page that draws on your own interests and experiences to make something compelling for future students. At your disposal are all of the openly licensed things on this page and anything else you want to incorporate. How might you use them? Do you want to use what I’ve written but include an example that is more impactful? Do you want to find other things to incorporate into the remix? Remember, everything on this page is openly licensed, so you can chop it up and reuse it however you’d like. After you’ve given this a little thought, we’ll talk about attribution statements and creative commons licenses, a crucial step in the process of adapting work in the digital age.
