12 Comments

  • I had never even heard of that poet before. Now I feel compelled to dig up some of his poems and quote from them on Facebook and/or my blog.

  • The guy doesn’t seem to realize that his narrow personal interpretation of fair use is of no legal relevance.

  • This letter may, however, be a great marketing ploy! As one who’d never heard of Zukofsky, this post and its links brought him to my attention. Having read excerpts, there’s no way I can quote him within fair use bounds as they prove execrable. Perhaps if I decide to write about bad American poetry I could do a line-by-line critique–all within fair use. It’s not worth the effort, though.

  • Difster,

    With an attitude like that letter shows, I suspect fewer and fewer people will hear of him as well.

  • I tried to read “A,” the big long masterpiece imitation of Pound’s Cantos. For the most part, it’s terrible and very dull.

  • All I got out of this was “Hello, you may not quote from this unknown guy without giving me remuneration, especially not on-line, and here’s a quote from LBJ to support my stance (which I probably did not give his estate remuneration for and I am posting on-line).” Possible hypocrisy there?

  • […] of work. Head over when you have time to give it a read – make sure you are sitting down.[via “The nastiest copyright notice ever written”.]Hello there! If you are new to InhouseBlog, subscribe to our RSS news feed, subscribe by email or […]

  • Ah, yes, that one’s quite famous — type “Paul Zukofsky” and then press space: Google Suggest will suggest to you the search “Paul Zukofsky copyright” yielding a whopping 105,000 hits. The internet was not kind to Zukofsky when his narrow views on “fair use” became widely known.

  • Everyone seems to miss the point.

    This copyright nastgram is a valuable public service to protect the unwary public from the worst drivel they will ever read and the morons who actually follow this detritus.

  • Evidently the author of the nastygram never heard of the “Streisand effect”; even though that applied to photographs, it can apply also to the written word…!

  • Guy has an awfully weird concept of “fair use”, not least of which is that he seems to think it requires his permission.

  • It is all a clever ploy!

    I plans to sue folks for publishing his copyright notice without paying him royalties.