On March 5th we gave a presentation to IT4Arts, the arts panel of the IT Livery Company; The Trouble with Poetry took a wide-ranging look at the constant interplay between art (and the business of art) and intellectual property rights to find out how the internet is affecting both. We’re reproducing our ‘script’ for it here partly for the benefit of the sessions’ attendees, partly as a capture of much of the thinking we’ve been doing on the topic over the last few months and perhaps most of all as the starting place for an entire category in this blog.
The talk was broadly divided into three parts:
• In the deep end… with poetry
• Making property out of ideas
• Does the Street do your job better than the Court?
As it was such a long session we’ve split it into separate blog posts for each of the sections.
Part One: In the deep end… with poetry
We hear a lot about the record industry being the canary in the coalmine for digital media, sound files being so much smaller than video files. But text-based files are much, much, much smaller… so, without much of a fanfare at all, poetry became part of the web right from the start.
Not everyone is happy about the consequences of its pioneering spirit. Wendy Cope is outraged to find her poems all over the internet.
‘The authors of short, funny poems are especially vulnerable. Such poems have a tendency to run off on their own and detach themselves from the names of their authors.’
‘My poems are all over the internet. I've managed to get them removed from one or two sites that were major offenders, but there are dozens, if not hundreds of sites displaying poems without permission.’
‘Free publicity has no value if all that happens is that even more people download your poems from the internet without paying for them.’
That’s pretty clear on the matter, but not everyone sees it that way. Oliver Burkeman for one:
‘For a start, there's something fishy about any argument that begins from the position that poetry, which has been created and shared for millennia, depends for its flourishing on the strict application of copyright law (which dates, in any recognisable form, only to 1709). *
‘Suppose I email a Cope poem to 10 people, along with a note urging them to read it. Most recipients, presumably, will be neither more nor less likely to buy one of her books as a result. One or two, I suppose, might dislike the poem and resolve never to pay money for a collection. But of those who read the poem and respond positively, what is really more likely - that they will savour it and conclude that, having done so, they need not buy a Wendy Cope collection as they had previously been planning to do? Or that her work will strike a chord with them, prompting them, now or at some point in the future, to buy a book, for themselves or as a gift for a friend? Cope surely can't really believe that the former response is more likely than the latter, can she? Apart from anything else, what about the people who'd never even heard of Cope until the email reached them?’
(* As an aside, we were struck by Cope’s observations’ similarity to the ‘Home Taping is Killing Music’ line from the 70's and 80s. Not so much the specifics of the message: more the equation of the industry of art is the same as the art itself. It’s a common mistake; even the reliably insightful Seth Godin has made the mistake recently, as discussed briefly by Simon on DGMS.)
Julian Gough responds to Wendy by announcing how much he appreciates the fluidity of movement the web allows:
'I wrote a story called The Great Hargeisa Goat Bubble. It was the first short story ever printed in the Financial Times, for which I was paid a decent sum. (It was also published in New Writing 12, for which I was paid also.)The Financial Times put it up on their website. Now, the story is a comedy set in Somaliland, (part of the disintegrated carcass of Somalia), a territory not yet officially recognised by the UN. And a number of Somaliland websites, and websites campaigning for recognition for Somaliland, immediately ‘pirated’ it, as Wendy would see it. They copied it, and they stuck the story up on their websites, without permission.
I was delighted. I'd been paid, and this spread my story, again, to people who would never normally read me. Now, what good would it have done to order them to take it down? To enforce my ‘rights’?
Wendy, in her original article, says she's upset about people emailing a poem of hers to their friends. This seems a wildly inappropriate response. The alternative to that email is not the copyright-breacher buying ten Wendy Cope books and posting them to ten different people around the world. It's no Wendy Cope poem being sent, or read, at all, by these people, in any form.One possible response (Faber could do it for her): A polite, form email thanking those who've (mis)used one of her poems, and including a html link to the Amazon page for the relevant book. Ask them to put the link up alongside the poem.'
Meanwhile, The Reader magazine tried to do it legitimately and fell foul of errant legal nonsense.
'In the last of our poetry recommendations for this week Reader outreach worker and Reader Online editor Katie Peters chooses Simon Armitage’s ‘The Stone Beach’. She says: ‘I like stanzas 4 and 6 best, and especially the idea of living in the present but simultaneously carrying the memory of a distant past life which lives on in the present through that memory and through those who shared that life with you.’Of course we asked permission to print this poem and
Simon Armitage replied through his agent that he was happy for it to appear here, but to contact Faber, the publisher, to confirm. The agent said there was unlikely to be a problem. Unfortunately it wasn’t to be. I contacted the permissions department of Faber earlier in the week to ask if we could post the poem here. We promised of course to cite the conditions of the permission offered and it goes without saying that we would have linked to the Faber catalogue and to places where our readers could buy the collection The Universal Home Doctor, which was published in 2002.In the end on Friday I received word from Faber that we would be able to publish the poem here, but at a cost of £155 (ex. VAT, naturally). That would buy us a year of having the poem on this page, but Faber would retain the right to take it down with a month’s notice. Since we would be providing publicity for Faber*, rather than the other way around, I declined this generous offer.
(* this argument is something we see over and over in debates around IP, whether it be YouTube vs PRS or the Radio sector vs Music Labels - the question about who should pay who, promoter or creator, is never likely to be resolved)
So instead of the poem, let us all consider Faber’s permissions letter, published in full below. I’m going to be writing more on this topic in the next few days, since it seems to resonate with the mistakes made by the music industry over the last few years. I just love the bit about not ‘photocopying downloads,’ whatever that means. In the mean time if you think this document is as ridiculous as I do, feel free to contact Faber to tell them so.Fee: £155.00 plus VAT. This permission is granted for the period of one year only and we reserve the right to withdraw our permission with one month’s notice. A copyright line including the title of the work, the source of the poem, the author and Faber and Faber Ltd as the publisher must be printed, as well as a warning that photocopying downloads is against copyright law. We would also request that your web site is linked to a book shop site or our own web site [www.faber.co.uk]. Please indicate below how you wish to proceed and then return this fax to (+44) (0)20 7465 0108.If we do not receive a reply within thirty days we will assume that you have proceeded.
If after all that you still feel like reading the poem ‘The Stone Beach’ is freely available online here. Interestingly very few of the conditions imposed above have been met'
Let’s be clear about where the poem is ‘freely available’ again: The Guardian!
A quick look at PoemHunter.com – the poetry ‘piracy’ website - gives a sense of the problem’s scale. Try this:
• Perform a quick search for Wendy Cope
• Notice there’s there’s nothing thee!
• Now imagine a half-remembered pub conversation about a Ted Hughes poem about a fox, or something.
• Perform a quick search for ‘Ted Hughes fox’
• Bingo!
There are, of course, other ways in which the web is making poetry very (or too?) accessible. Shanna Compton, poet blogger, says ‘Just get the poems out there’.
'The handful of print journals I’d appeared in had each arrived on the newsstand or bookstore shelf with a meager fwipple, then promptly vanished, like a half-stifled sneeze.On these emerging blogs, as well as on e-mail lists and forums, I’d finally found what I’d been looking for working in publishing, hanging around at readings, and going to grad school: other poets. Not famous ones, elder ones, teaching ones, laureate ones, or the ones with books from Knopf stocked at Barnes & Noble. The other ones. Ones like me.
But what most engrosses me are the more disputatious conversations, I’ll admit it. I’m not talking about blogwars or exercises in flaming. (File those under Personality, not Poetry.) I mean those times when poets really engage, discuss, argue, propose, question, or plead.'
Eileen Tabios, publisher of Meritage Press and editor/publisher of the review Galatea Resurrects, finds the openness, spontaneity, and relative accessibility of blogs and online journals to be corrective:
'One of the healthiest elements about poetry blogging is how poetry blogland more accurately mirrors the nature of Poetry than has traditional canon-making poetic machinery. There have always been more poets and poems than those marble-ized in Norton anthologies, ‘best of’ anthologies, et al. . . . There is no center—or there are many centers—in poetry.'
Let’s sum up what she was noticing about the effects of the web on publishing, diagram-style:
(Click on it for a larger version)
Interestingly, The Telegraph thinks that the internet is causing ‘a poetry boom’
Richard Price, a published poet who is also head of modern collections at the British Library, thought computers were actually helping poetry.Competitions are also booming: the number of entries for the Foyle Young Poets Award more than doubling from 2003 to 2008 to almost 12,000. He said: ‘What's interesting is it's counter-intuitive. You would have thought that poetry and pamphlets would be failing in the face of the internet, but that isn't happening.’ He argued: ‘It's very like the relationship between the net and live music. ‘It's perfectly possible to make music records fairly cheaply, put them up on the net and that's it. ‘You would expect live music to disappear but it hasn't, the opposite has happened.’ And rather than making poetry pamphlets ‘obsolete’, Mr Price said the internet had provided ‘a limitless shop window for a new generation of small presses and micro-publishers’.
The number of pamphlets sent to the Poetry Book Society for publication rose from 37 to 90 between 2006 and 2008. Andrew Motion, the Poet Laureate, thought poetry as an art form was simply well suited to the internet. He said that because the web allowed people to listen to poetry once more, it had helped return it to the position it held in the ‘mead halls’ 1,000 years ago. ‘The last 1,000 years is not exactly an aberration, but a long loop,’ said Mr Motion, whose 10-year term expires on May 1. ‘Poetry is as much to do with the noise the poem makes as about what the words mean when written on a page,’ he explained. ‘It is crucially an oral form – its character depends on it.’ Websites like Poetry Archive, which enables people to listen to recordings of poets like TS Eliot and Allen Ginsberg reading their work, are now enjoying unprecedented success.
Poetry Archive , which Mr Motion helped set up, now receives 135,000 visitors a month and a million page hits. Its ‘surprising’ success had led him to conclude that the real problem with poetry was ‘not one of appetite, but of delivery’.'
And finally… China embraces the democracy of the web with a poetry competition!
A middle-aged primary school teacher reciting a 1,300-year-old poem could become China's answer to an American Idol-type superstar thanks to on-line voting in a government-sponsored competition. The 40-year-old from the eastern Anhui Province, Fang Baojiu, was leading the field of 179 performers one week into the three-week poetry recital contest with more than 38,060 votes as of Friday evening. All the contestants have submitted videos of their recitals to the Ministry of Education, which has organized the competition and posted the performances on the official website.
Since the videos were posted on Nov. 7, the website has attracted an average of 19,933 votes a day and with the daily record of 54,306, including 676 votes from Hong Kong.‘It was out of my expectation that the on-line voting would draw such attention,’ Wang said. ‘We thought young people might have lost interest in classical Chinese literature.’ On the website and forums of many colleges and schools, young people had debated the performances and posted supportive messages for their favorites. ‘The contestants have become stars,’ Wang said.
So popular has the contest been that Internet technology firms approached the ministry to host the on-line voting, but the ministry wants to keep the contest non-profit, said Wang. ‘To guarantee fair play, we try our best to supervise the voting and prevent any manipulation,’ he said. The annual nationwide contest began last year and is intended to raise awareness of traditional literature. The on-line vote, the first of its kind in China, will last till Nov. 30 as part of the preliminary contest. The result of this stage is to be decided by both on-line voting and a panel of judges.'
Justin
Part 2: Making property out of ideas
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