Douglas Barbour wrote:
> Reading this & LeGuin, one can understand her worry, & many others'; 
> but for a relatively little known poet, it may be less bothersome a 
> question. I mean, you, Alison, have your fantasy novels to worry 
> about, but many of us have a few collections of poems, & in my case, I 
> confess, only some hundreds of copies of all of the out there.
>
> I get the worry, especially about the end-run around copyright, & the 
> refusal of LeGuin & others, to join, but I'm not sure it matters, 
> finally, to someone like me, one way or the other....

I've been following this for awhile. Why not?

I understand the concerns but now it's getting too damned fine-tuned for 
for shrinking cerebral arteries. I  understand that a lot of us derive 
most of our incomes not from writing but from teaching or pilfering cash 
registers while the cashiers' backs are turned. Hell, if William S. 
Burroughs ever told the truth about *anything* he may actually have 
worked as an exterminator.

I can't help remembering the late Lenny Bruce's famous routine "The 
Palladium." At one point he fires off, "The GOOD room! the CLASS date! 
If they offered me $5,000 a week to work the Fairmont Hotel or $5,001 to 
work the Salvation Army Reading Room, I'd be at the Reading Room like 
THAT! Hey, I'm a *hustler*, if they give, I'll grab!" So I sit here 
newly (3 weeks) arrived on the far eastern edge of Pennsylvania, knowing 
not a soul except the checkout people at WalMart (O sciagura!), and my 
view feels dreadfully skewed and surely unjust. If you are LeGuin or 
Croggon (that is not flattery, Alison, it's simply how you two earn your 
livings), the gigantic Google aardvaark sucking up everything in its 
path is indeed a real threat to your living.

Google potentially (if it hasn't already happened) has become more of a 
threat than Microsoft ever was. Reading a Googlized book seems morally 
tantamount to shopping in WalMart (v. *supra*). At the same time, then, 
if Google offered to pay someone like *me*, a person with no cash value 
whatsoever, for about 1,000 poems (good, bad, or hopeless) from my hard 
drives and backups, I'd do it. Why? Because I may very well be for sale. 
I'm not going to die of a bad review or "do a Chatterton." I recall 
instead yet another presumed "comic," Eddie Murphy, portraying one of 
his more offensive characters, Velvet Jones, founder of the Velvet Jones 
School of Technology. He comes out in his full pimp regalia marketing a 
book called "Ah wants to be a 'ho!"

Maybe I'm in a trailer park of the mind at the moment (you've got to see 
Bristol, PA, Patrick--no more Raynes Park jokes after that) so that if 
you drag a hundred dollar bill in front of me, I'll chase the thing:-). 
Put another way, if I wake up tomorrow morning as a living white guy 
with a "rep" to protect, I might get really torqued at Google for 
sticky-fingering my work on the pretext they're preserving it. As it is, 
few among us have that much live ammo to worry about. And fewer can 
afford to fight Google's lawyers.

Does anyone recall Neal Bowers' cautionary tale *Words for the Taking*?  
He tracked down the man who plagiarized big chunks of his work as well 
as the works of other poets. He ran the thief to ground, took him to 
court, and--if I recall this--the judge ruled for Bowers. The strangest 
part is that Google Books now has huge sections of *Words* leading the 
reader to legitimate links. I wish I'd made this up.

ken