Get On, Clip In, Fall Off

Inflicting Poetry On People Day

I'm told that it's "Put Poetry On Your Web Page" day or something (okay, it's Poem On
Your Blog Day). This has reminded me of the day about six or seven years ago that the real world discovered the Internet, or at least the day I became aware that the real world had discovered the net. For donkey's years I have been associated with a website, The L-Space Web, which at the time included a hefty quote from a poem as part of an annotation. I won't name the poem here as the name still makes me come out in boils, but it's probably identifiable given the knowledge that the first letter of its name is D, it's full of trite platitudes and it's a favourite of people who make little plaques with Inspirational Poems on them. If you're still uncertain, check out this page which should make things clear.

One day I got a registered letter from the States from, surprise, a lawyer who owned the copyright to the poem concerned. The letter informed me that if I didn't want to get sued to the ends of the earth and back I'd better start talking about how much I'd pay for the "unauthorised reproduction" of this copyrighted work. It was sent to me because my name and address were on the domain record, although the domain contacts were in three different countries and the document concerned was written by a Dutchman and published on mirror sites spread across the world. This fact alone would have made any legal action fairly interesting and probably excitingly expensive but at the time it wasn't something I particularly wanted to happen, so after a bit of an exchange of letters we just made the change to the page to take the poem out and substitute a supplied text about how very copyrighted that poem was. Fortunately, everyone was happy with this outcome and we didn't pay anything to anyone.

The whole thing was rather unpleasant, and I didn't at all appreciate being threatened and cajoled by someone who had evidently spent the last 40 years intimidating and occasionally sueing people over a poem he didn't even write - he'd bought the rights from the original author's heirs around 1960. The whole issue was something that at the time I could have well done without. What was even more annoying about it was that the poem concerned was a load of old codswallop suitable only for printing on teatowels or on those posters with pictures of rainbows and clouds (or maybe waterfalls) in the background.

But anyway, I digress. My poem for the day is by me (so hey, I know the copyright position, and it's mine, all mine!), and it's a tribute to the shortest line on the London Underground.