when god lets my body be

by e.e. cummings

when god lets my body be from each brave eye shall sprout a tree fruit that dangles therefrom the purpled world will dance upon between my lips which did sing a rose shall beget the spring that maidens whom passion wastes will lay between their little breasts my strong fingers beneath the snow into strenuous birds shall go my love walking in the grass their wings will touch with her face and all the while shall my heart be with the bulge and nuzzle of the sea

E. E. Cummings is important to me and maybe to you too. But you don't get to read "when god lets my body be" today because monetizing his products sixty years after his death is more important to W W Norton, who sent me a copyright infringement notice for trying to show you this poem.

Copyright is harmful and counterproductive and it is strangling our culture and progress. No one has a natural right to own an idea. Owning ideas is intuitively absurd. And copyright holders do not own their ideas exactly. They have been granted a temporary monopoly on reproduction, in order to encourage artists to produce works of value to us all. Or it used to be temporary, anyway. The original Copyright Act on 1790 set the duration to 14 years, with the right of renewal for one additional 14 year term if the author was still alive. If that reasonable term was still in effect, works created before 1988 would all be in the public domain now (2012). Can you imagine a world where everything by The Beatles was in the public domain by now? It's easy if you try.

Dig the graph on this article about the objective harm copyright is doing to our culture, The Missing 20th Century. Ugly.