Post by Barbara's CatHere's one of my favorite poems by Karla (I'm sure she won't mind me
[ illegal publishing of Karla's poem snipped ]
The proper and legal thing to do would have been
to ask Karla if it would be okay for you to post
her poem BEFORE you posted her poem, imbecile.
Copyright -- it's not just a word.
Years ago, it used to be okay to re-post a poem for discussion in the same
group where it was originally posted. I was an instigator of that myself
back when I would try to have some fun with National Poetry Month. I'd make
a post asking folks to post their favorite poem by another contributor of
the group, urging proper attribution, of course. I think many of us thought
of r.a.p. or a.a.p.c. as a kind of a writers' group where our work was in
progress, and our posting of it here was not publishing it, per se. That
doesn't change much with respect to copyright. I don't know if it's been
ruled on one way or another, that is, are poems, stories, flash fiction,
etc. posted to Usenet "published"? I got different answers to that
questions from the legal beagles. Do you know? What do you base your post
on?
Of course, the law and courteous behavior are two different things. It
would have been nice to have been asked before the fact. And along that
line, I continue to object to and dislike the posting of my poems to groups
I didn't originally post to, such as alt.poetry and alt.arts.poetry. I
dislike that people cross-post posts from r.a.p. to a.a.p.c. when the
original poster didn't post it there. If I wanted to participate in that
group, I would do so. But what's the use! I'm a broken record on that
score.