Wendy gets it right
... as always. I only wish I could be like her.
Regular readers will know that my thinking recently on the Welsh Library's digital archiving/copyright row was partial and rather shallow. I'm not retracting any of my thoughts, because I think I even said at the time that I was casting about for a framework for my thinking on the subject... anyway, two people have sounded great knells of common sense. One was my friend Mark, in Ireland, who wrote to me: "My wife... is a recognised authority on copyright law. I'll show her your post and see what she thinks. She would probably feel that the poets should have been asked (never mind the paltry sums involved) since such courtesy should be a basic requirement. Most schools and universities here are finally paying for the privilege of photocopying copyright material. The money then goes into a pool and is distributed to authors by means of surveys (to see which works are being copied). All very complex and imperfect, but writers DO get paid (not many of them poets of course)."
And the other was Wendy Cope, a very decisive, clear thinker, who wrote on the subject very decisively indeed in the Guardian last week.
I'm afraid now to quote very extensively from her article! I'll just quote this:
"In an attempt to do something about widespread ignorance of copyright law, the ALCS and the Poetry Society commissioned me, some years ago, to write a poem on the subject. It is called The Law of Copyright and the form is borrowed from Kipling's poem The Law of the Jungle. Too long to reproduce here, the poem points out that
'This is the law: the creator has rights that you can't overlook.
It isn't OK to make copies - you have to fork out for the book'."
I'm happy to report, however, that I can hold my head up. Whyen I was researching a long article on Wendy Cope a couple of years ago, I showed some of her poems to my best friend - Ms Rational Self-Determinism - whom I thought they would amuse. They did, and she went out and bought all of Cope's books.
Of course, I'm still not sure if I think poems - that is, just any poems - have what could be defined as a parket value. And I'm sure that two hundred years ago people would have copied out a poem they liked by hand, and given it to their friends - and of course many of us are not so fortunate (yet) to be able to rely on the income from readings to pay for anything much more substantial than a drink... which is why I think Mark's comments are so sound. It's not just about money. As usual, money is the least interesting, and most distracting, part of the equation.
3 comments:
I'd be interested to know what your friend Mark's wife has to say about quoting on the web, as opposed to photocopying or copying by hand. All UK-based writers should be members of the ALCS. Even if they don't register individual works, the scribblers can be sure of receiving an annual cheque for a monkey or thereabouts. Fifty pounds may seem little, but it's not to be sniffed at by those who might otherwise be starving in their garrets.
The problem is that copyright law is little developed as far as web publication is concerned. At least that's what I was told earlier this year by the NUJ's legal people. But I believe that those who write for the web are better able to assert moral rights and prevent publishers from reusing material without further payment, than authors who work for dead tree newspapers and print magazines.
I actually thought Wendy Cope's piece a little too strident, ignoring as it did the possibility that finding an audience online - likely a much wider audience than would otherwise read poetry - might stimulate book sales (and reading requests, for that matter). Disclosure: I often search for half-remembered Wendy Cope poems to share with others, but then I also have at least two of her books.
Yes, Badgergirl, I think it's a more complicated situation than Cope allows. She is coming from a particular perspective as a high-profile poet who IS able to make a living from her writing and doesn't face the situation which other writers do, in which if they put their foot down and insist on payment their work is simply not used, ie suppressed.
However, as Academi's Peter Finch points out in the letter he sent out last summer, the digitization of Welsh journals has been funded, there WAS money available, and yet no one thought to offer any to the writers, the primary providers of the work in question - which has very serious implications for the status of writers in the scheme of things.
I blogged about it at the time:
http://fictionbitch.blogspot.com/2007/08/words-for-free.html
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