Talk:Disillusionment of Ten O'Clock

Scott5114 removed the text of this poem because of copyright concerns. I reinserted the text, because fair use permits quotation as part of discussion, such as scholarly commentary. Whole poems are regularly quoted in books and journals, so there is ample precedent. Although the poem in question belongs to a book protected by copyright for several more years, copyright doesn't interfere with fair use. The book can't be reprinted without consent of the copyright holder, but parts of it can be reprinted without securing consent. The courts recognize the need to protect not only owners of copyright but also journalists, teachers, scholars, etc., and fair-use law is how they do that. There is uncertainty about the length of quotations that can be justified by fair use, but individual short poems like most of those in Harmonium are clearly short enough because the poems that create the precedent are of comparable length. (The page for one of the longer poems, "Le Monocle de Mon Oncle", includes only a short canto.) The law changes of course, and it may narrow free use just as (notoriously) it has lengthened copyright. (Lawrence Lessig fought for a more reasonable decision and lost, as he describes in his must-read book Free Culture.) Legal shrinkage of fair use hasn't happened yet. We should be happy about that and vigorously assert our fair-use rights. A page like "Disillusionment of Ten O'Clock" does its modest bit. Rats 07:39, 27 October 2006 (UTC)