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Posted by: Barbara Currier Bell, January editor (bcbell@aol.com) The loss of rights to one's own work and the concomitant loss of access to the work of others may not be new, but the interpretation in legal and financial terms has progressively hardened in the last several years. Where only a few years ago we were allowed to cite short passages from our own or other people's previous work, that is now subjst to charges of plagiarism or one must pay. I am always happy to pay for other author's royalties, but that is not where the fee-for-use goes. Because the *publisher*, not the author/creator and not the public "owns" the words, the fee for use goes to the publisher. Recently I was asked for permission to include a couple of paragraphs of mine in a book about to be published. I would have been happy to grant permission, but that was not my privilege. I had received no remuneration for the piece, but the authors of the new book had to pay a fee to my publishers. I received not one red cent, but worst of all I have no right to grant the use. Scholarship and creative work are thus doubly marginalized. I wanted to quote two lines of a T.S. Eliot poem in a book I was writing and discovered that I would have to pay a fee of $100 a line. That does not go to the poet, obviously. It means that Eliot's fine phrases went missing, and that is the greater loss. the question of who owns a work is complex, but right now we have a radically simplified legal program in which those who have the printing press control the information. "Masked-man, they put a dam up there on Hangdog Creek, and all the cows down here are thirsty." Kemo sabe. --
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