On reflection and partly as a result of discussion here, I need to revise
my previous statement that I'd be glad to have my writing reproduced with or
without payment or permission.  Of course I'd like to have enough control
over my work to ensure that it was used appropriately, and if for some
unimaginably bizarre reason something I wrote turned out to have commercial
potential, I'd want my share of it.  But I think I had a reasonable concern,
though I didn't express it well.

   My contention is that current copyright law and practice actually limit
an author's control over publishing in significant though rarely recognized
ways.  They prevent me from opting to encourage the distribution of my work
by offering it for free.  It won't do to say that I can give permission if I
want:  the problem is not giving permission but getting it.  If for instance
some college teacher in Kansas comes across an article I published three
years ago in a regional English literary magazine and wants to include it in
a course syllabus, or the editor of a Web zine discovers a poem of mine
which I sent to an archived  email list when I had a now obsolete email
address and wants to republish it, it will be so difficult for these people
to track me down to get permission that they are likely to decide to forgo
using my work.

   A personal experience with permissions involving this email list may
illustrate how difficult getting permission can be.  Some while ago I read
in a major newspaper a brief opinion column by a well known poet which I
thought was very pertinent to certain discussions which were taking place
then on poetry-etc.  I went to this newspaper's Web site and found that the
article was included in it, which meant it would be very easy to
cut-and-paste it into an email for use here.  The Web site also included an
email address to be used to contact the paper for permission to copy its
articles.  So I sent off an email asking if I could post a copy of that
column to an international, non-commercial poetry email list whose members
included many published poets, some of them fairly prominent.  Six weeks
later I received a "form letter" email reply advising me that such
permission had to be sought from the author, and giving not the slightest
hint of how to contact him.  Since I had no idea even what country he
currently lived in, I just gave up.  No doubt I could have gone to the
library, looked up some of his books, copied down the publisher's name, gone
to the reference desk and asked how to get that publisher's address, written
the publisher a letter asking how to contact the author, and then waited one
or three or six months for a reply that might or might not tell me what I'd
asked assuming it ever came at all, and then I could finally have written
the author and waited months more for a response which might or might not
grant permission assuming it ever came at all.  But by this point the game
obviously wasn't worth the candle.  (Yes, I know I could have avoided all
this by just posting a link, but links never generate discussion and anyway
the objection isn't relevant to the point of the story which is to show how
hard it can be to get permission.)

   Thus this particular author was deprived of an opportunity to have his
work republished in a forum which he may possibly have considered a valuable
one to gain exposure in.  And note that this example involved an article by
a prominent author published in a major newspaper which provided an email
contact specifically for asking permissions.  If that proved impossible,
then what hope is there for people who might need to contact the obscure
scriveners like myself who constitute the bulk of our literary types?

   But it occurs to me that the internet may come to our help.  What's
needed is a central permissions clearing house.  This could consist of a Web
site on which authors could post their names and an email address.  It
wouldn't need much more than that, though it might be valuable also to
provide for the flagging of authors who were willing to give blanket
permission for noncommercial use, so they wouldn't even need to be
contacted.  (Appropriate legalese defining the noncommercial use would need
to be added.)  Such a site would probably be too much for an individual to
handle on an amateur basis, but it surely would be within the resources of
many non-profit, academic, or government institutions.  If anyone wants to
develop this idea, please feel free to.  You don't need to ask my
permission.

====


There ain't no sanity clause.

                 -- Chico Marx

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