One summer’s day, strolling through a cemetery, my partner and I had a conversation about what we would like on our gravestones. He suggested that mine should read: ‘Wendy Cope. All Rights Reserved.”
He knows that I am obsessed with copyright. A poem is very easy to copy, whereas nobody is going to photocopy or download a whole novel or work of non-fiction. Poets are thus especially at risk if people do not know and respect copyright law.
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. There’s a well-known poem I’ve liked since I was quite small.
The rain it raineth every day
Upon the just and unjust fella
But mostly on the just because
The unjust hath the just’s umbrella.
For decades I thought of it as anonymous. Then, when I was compiling an anthology of poems for children, I found it in the British Library with an author’s name on it: Baron Charles Bowen. I was happy to reunite poem and author in the anthology.
I’ve seen a poem by Ogden Nash in paint on a beam in a pub with no mention of the author’s name. I’ve seen one of mine in an anthology, attributed to Dorothy Parker. But this isn’t just about short poems. There’s a problem for the authors of all poems, unless they’re really long, like Paradise Lost.
A few years ago one of my stepsisters asked me about Jenny Joseph’s poem Warning — the one that begins: When I am an old woman I shall wear purple.
My stepsister spends a lot of time in the United States and had heard about the Red Hat Society, a women’s organisation inspired by Joseph’s poem. As Warning is included in an anthology I edited, I offered to send her a copy. ‘No,” she said. ‘Don’t bother. I’ll get it off the internet.” That was when it dawned on me that nowadays, if you want a copy of a particular poem, you don’t have to buy a book.
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.
If I Google the title of one of my poems, it is almost always there somewhere. I’m sure that this must affect sales of my books. Publishers aren’t happy either because they, too, are being robbed. But everyone agrees that internet piracy is extremely difficult to fight.
Often the offending websites are the responsibility of well-meaning enthusiasts, who have no idea that they are breaking the law. Neither do the people I meet every now and then who say: ‘I liked your poem so much that I sent copies of it to all my friends.” I’m supposed to be pleased.
I’ve learned to smile and say thank you and point out very politely that, strictly speaking, they shouldn’t have done that. They should have told their friends to buy the book. Or bought it for them.
In an attempt to do something about widespread ignorance of copyright law, the Authors’ Licensing and Collecting Society 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.
One argument that often comes up in relation to all this is ‘but it’s free publicity”. Well, it’s true that there are poets who are happy to see their work anywhere and everywhere, just for the sake of the attention. But for those of us who make a little bit of money from royalties and permission fees, and depend on that income, it’s different. Free publicity has no value if all that happens is that even more people download your poems from the internet without paying for them.
In the long run we’ll be in no position to benefit from royalties or permission fees. All poets hope that their work will outlive them. I’m no exception. Even so, I sometimes feel a bit annoyed by the prospect of people making money out of my poems when I’m too dead to spend it.
And I feel sad for other poets. One day I came across some postcards in a gift shop featuring poems by AE Housman, who died in 1936. I bought a postcard and, on the back of it, wrote the following lines. When I hear them in my head, they are sung to the tune of the hymn The Church’s One Foundation.
POSTCARD POEM
Will they do this, I wonder
With verse of mine or yours
When we are six feet under
And deaf to all applause?
We bring home little bacon
En route for that long night
And when the profit’s taken
We’re out of copyright.
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