You like my poems? So pay for them

Wendy Cope is outraged to find her work all over the internet

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 all too well 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 white 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. I could mention numerous other examples.

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


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, and I can download it and print it out. I'm sure that this must affect sales of my books. I've tried Googling some of Seamus Heaney's poems, and those of one or two other well-known poets, and it's the same. Authors' organisations - The Society of Authors, The Authors' Licensing and Collecting Society (ALCS) - are concerned about this problem. Publishers aren't happy either because they, too, are being robbed. But everyone agrees that internet piracy is extremely difficult to fight.


In an attempt to do something about widespread ignorance of copyright law, the ALCS 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".

Another beef concerns literary festivals. These days they often invite actors or anthologists to come along and present a programme of other people's poems. I'd like to be sure that they have cleared permission to read the work to a paying audience, and I know that in many cases they haven't. So the people who wrote the work are getting no benefit from the event. For most poets, fees for doing readings of their own work are an important part of their income. So, if festivals invite actors or anthologists instead, and the poets are not paid for the use of their work, poets have cause for complaint.


In the long run - if our poems survive into 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:


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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