Recent, highly productive discussions of intellectual property and authorship in English studies have concentrated on two broad areas of inquiry. Scholars have repeatedly asserted fair use principles to mobilize resistance against the legal trends restricting texts' circulation. At the same time, growing appreciation of student writing and other marginalized groups' creative acts as forms of authorship has prompted teacher-scholars' calls for recognizing the shared patterns of ownership often associated with such work. Andrea A. Lunsford and Susan West, of course, set the stage for succeeding discussions in their groundbreaking essay, "Intellectual Property and Composition Studies." Significantly, they identified both of the major areas of inquiry that have driven intellectual property work in composition studies since then. On the one hand, they critiqued "the field's silent complicity in shrinking the intellectual commons" and pointed to challenges from critical theory, the scientific community, and new technology that should promote less modernist views of authorship. On the other, they noted that "teachers often in effect appropriate the writing of students," unfairly moving to "commodify and trade in the commercial value of student writing, which legitimates teacherly claims to particular intellectual terrain." Building on the first point, intellectual property activists have focused on protecting the rights "consumers" need to have in order to access and use others' textual products--often as a step toward creating (or authoring) their own "new" texts. As a "flip side" of the intellectual property issue, the emphasis has been on protecting "producers" who are potentially vulnerable to appropriation and/or misuse, in large part because their status as authors is tenuous. So, in both directions, authorship has been at the heart of intellectual property discussions. In this article, the author presents a case study which includes, in Lunsford's terms, gendered "enactments, tracings of alternative forms of being and owning." These "alternative forms" offer some strategies for what the author calls "distributed authorship," a view of shared textual ownership adaptable to today's writing and publication circumstances. (Contains 3 notes.)