Poetry Reposting: Is It Copyright Violation?

I intended to make a video blog for this post, but 20-something takes later, I could never get a good clip that didn't have me garbling my words every other sentence, so I gave up on it. Maybe I'll get one out tomorrow.

Today, I want to talk about an interesting phenomenon I've observed since I started posting my poetry here on my blog. I've mentioned before how StumbleUpon brought thousands of visitors to my poem How to Greet Death. After a few months, I started noticing that my site was receiving backlinks from a number of different blogs and Tumblr accounts, and when I followed those backlinks to see where my traffic was coming from, I discovered something: people were taking my poem, copying it, and posting it on their own blogs.

Initially, I was annoyed. People were taking my content and posting it to pad their own sites, and they were doing it without permission. For most bloggers, that kind of thing can be bad news-- when the same content appears on dozens of different websites, Google's been known to penalize that content's rankings, and that can cost a blogger traffic and (potentially) money.

But Are Poetry Reposters The Same As Content Thieves?

After my kneejerk reaction passed, though, I took a closer look. Everyone who copied the poem credited it, and 9 out of 10 of them provided a link to my website. Poems never rank well on search engines anyway, since they typically lack the keyword density necessary to reach the top spots, so having my content duplicated wasn't likely to harm my rankings much, and out of 23 reposts (that I've identified), 21 of them provided one-way links to my site. I still receive a reasonable amount of traffic from those links, and I didn't have to do anything to get them.

On the other hand, people who read my poetry on another site don't contribute to my ad revenue, and they aren't likely to purchase MP3s or do any of the supportive things that my direct visitors do, so it's debatable whether or not those reposts help or hinder my efforts. I think, in the end, they mostly break even.

Reposting Is, Technically, A Copyright Violation

In all technicality, everyone (with the exception of one polite blogger) who reposted my poem has committed copyright violation, since they didn't seek permission before doing so. If I were anal about such things, I suppose I could pursue legal methods to get those posts removed -- either through DMCA notices or through contacting the reposters' hosts or ISPs. But going through all that takes a lot of time and energy -- time and energy that would be better spent writing new poetry, promoting my site, and building connections with readers and other poetry bloggers.

Like it or not, anything you post online has a chance of being copied and reproduced elsewhere. That goes for any type of content, really, including blog posts, poetry, pictures, video, fiction works, and more, and there's usually not too much you can do about it. As always, if you're particularly protective of your copyrights, make sure your work never hits the Internet.

Publication Concerns

The biggest problem with reposters is that they make it marginally more difficult to get a poem published. A fair number of poetry journals will accept previously published work (and poetry blogs often count for that "previously published" moniker), but it's not uncommon for journals to ask you to remove the original post before your poem appears in their journal -- when the poem has been distributed to dozens of blogs, it's nigh impossible to get those posts removed, and that could, theoretically, hurt your chances of getting the poem published.

Of course, that's assuming you're actually planning on submitting the poem in question for publication. Like most of the poems published on this blog, How to Greet Death will probably never appear in a published work (at least not one I haven't produced myself), unless a publisher contacts me directly to ask if they can use it -- the poems I do submit to literary journals and anthologies are typically poems that have never been publicly released.

So What Do You Do About Reposters?

In the end, I decided to modify my Site Policies to allow reposting. Previously, the policies stated that you had to seek my permission before reproducing my poetry, but since people were doing it anyway without permission, I decided to just go ahead and make it official. Of course, my policies still include caveats to protect my financial interests. I also set up Google Alerts for a few key phrases (such as my name, and poem titles), so I receive an email notification whenever someone reposts one of my poems -- it's not a foolproof method, because Google Alerts misses some content, but it catches most of them.

So what do you think? If you're a poet, have you ever found one of your poems reposted without your permission? If so, how did you deal with it? If you aren't a poet, what's your opinion on the subject? Leave your thoughts in the comments.