Terry Teachout thus nominates the verbal barbed wire that surrounds the work of the late poet Louis Zukofsky (see also).
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I had never even heard of that poet before. Now I feel compelled to dig up some of his poems and quote from them on Facebook and/or my blog.
The guy doesn’t seem to realize that his narrow personal interpretation of fair use is of no legal relevance.
This letter may, however, be a great marketing ploy! As one who’d never heard of Zukofsky, this post and its links brought him to my attention. Having read excerpts, there’s no way I can quote him within fair use bounds as they prove execrable. Perhaps if I decide to write about bad American poetry I could do a line-by-line critique–all within fair use. It’s not worth the effort, though.
Difster,
With an attitude like that letter shows, I suspect fewer and fewer people will hear of him as well.
I tried to read “A,” the big long masterpiece imitation of Pound’s Cantos. For the most part, it’s terrible and very dull.
All I got out of this was “Hello, you may not quote from this unknown guy without giving me remuneration, especially not on-line, and here’s a quote from LBJ to support my stance (which I probably did not give his estate remuneration for and I am posting on-line).” Possible hypocrisy there?
Ah, yes, that one’s quite famous — type “Paul Zukofsky” and then press space: Google Suggest will suggest to you the search “Paul Zukofsky copyright” yielding a whopping 105,000 hits. The internet was not kind to Zukofsky when his narrow views on “fair use” became widely known.
Everyone seems to miss the point.
This copyright nastgram is a valuable public service to protect the unwary public from the worst drivel they will ever read and the morons who actually follow this detritus.
Evidently the author of the nastygram never heard of the “Streisand effect”; even though that applied to photographs, it can apply also to the written word…!
Guy has an awfully weird concept of “fair use”, not least of which is that he seems to think it requires his permission.
It is all a clever ploy!
I plans to sue folks for publishing his copyright notice without paying him royalties.
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