Law and order: Special Copyright Unit

The case of Maggie Ryan is introduced to us in Jim Ridolfo and Maritine Courant Rife’s “Rhetorical Velocity and Copyright: A Case Study of Strategies of Rhetorical Delivery.” Maggie Ryan was a student at Michigan State University that participated in a student protest for fair trade apparel. The activists in this protest wanted media attention and instead of using signs they used dye and their footprints to create messages in the snow. This protest took place in 2005, and during this time a photographer took candid photos of Maggie during a snowball fight. Ultimately the rhetorical goals of the protest were reached. The constant stream of protests, media and publicity the university formally joined the WRC (Worker Rights Consortium). Fast forward now to 2006, when Michigan State University used the snowball fight photo of Maggie on their page for advertising purposes. They then used this photo again in 2007 however this time they took it out of context by cropping her out of the background and placing her in a much more familiar and picturesque backdrop of the campus. Although the desired press coverage during the protest was achieved Maggie had no way of knowing how the university would later use the image of her to promote the Department of Student Life and the university itself.

In this article Ridolfo and Rife introduce many new terms to their audience. These terms are: rhetorical velocity, delivery, appropriation, and recomposition. By giving us Maggie’s case as an example they show the interconnection and relation of these terms. Delivery is the manner in which someone chooses to express something in order to enact meaning. In Maggie’s case the delivery is the way they protested, by using dye and their footprints to spread their message and attract attention. A term used quite often by Ridolfo and Rife is rhetorical velocity, which they define as  “a strategic concept of delivery in which a rhetor theorized the possibilities for the recomposition of a text based on how s/he anticipates how the text might later be used” (229). The rhetorician theorizes how the media may recompose and re-distribute the release in other media. The rhetorician also has to consider how the release may be recomposed in ways advantageous and disadvantageous to their original goals and objectives. Obviously in Maggie’s case she was aware of the photographer at the time but according to the article “a series of images were used in ways neither Maggie nor the other activists could have plausibly predicted” (229). Recomposition or recomposing is used quite often in the article and it refers to the composing of something that already exists to meet the new composers goals and objectives. The University used Maggie’s photo and recomposed it, by editing it and editing the context, in order to advertise for the university. This recomposition obviously changed the goals and objectives that the original instance had when the photo was taken. Maggie was appalled by this recomposition because it affected her character and called her credibility into question. Maggie claimed that the university “didn’t even contact me asking for my name nor my permission” (228)

The last term and the most prominent one to me in the article is appropriation. Appropriation is basically the act of taking something (that was not yours) for one’s own use. This is typically done without the permission of the owner. This term functions the most in their article because Maggie’s whole case is revolved around someone taking a photo of her (without her permission) and using it for their own purpose. The other terms all relate back to the act of appropriating or anticipating appropriation and the extent to which it is considered to be okay. "The purpose is to protect someone like Maggie from losing the commercial value of her likeness due to an unauthorized appropriation."(234)

In terms of Carolyn Miller’s definition of genre, this article and its terms reminded me of Miller’s relation to genre as a social action. Miller describes that we know how to handle situations because we all have a common knowledge of the predetermined types society has organized for us. Ridolfo and Rife are looking for a similar set of guidelines here for copyright. They would like something specific so that Maggie would have never been a victim to this appropriation.

- Cailyn Callaway