User blog:George Dance/March 2012

March 2012 - One problem with the copyright laws is that they destroy the value of a lot of poets' work. They do protect the income of a lucky few who achieve lasting fame in their lifetime; but for the vast majority who do not, all they do is keep their work suppressed for 50-70 years after their death, in consequence ensuring that they are forgotten. There needs to be a way to keep copyright-protected poets' work before the public.

In March, we discovered a site that does just that: the Australian Poetry Library. Like the other poetry sites we've been linking to, it carries the poetry of public-domain poets, but also for more modern, copyright-protected ones too. There are no problems with the copyright authorities, since the site is run by the authorities: by the Cultural Fund of the Copyright Agency Ltd., in conjunction with the University of Sydney. While all the poems on the site can be read for free, there is a (small) fee for making copies (downloads, pdfs, or prints) of any copyright-protected work, which is used to reimburse the author.

We spent most of the month linking the thousands of poems on that site. In consequence, our Australian representation has gone from our weakest site to one of our strongest. Many poets have hundreds of poems just 2 or 3 clicks from PPP; a couple have more than a thousand. We urge you to check our List of Australian poets, and sample the delights of that country's poetry for yourself.George Dance 01:08, April 2, 2012 (UTC)