Hey! That’s my poem!

 

 

You have created something wonderful. You have nurtured it, watched it grow. It is like your child and you love it. Then someone nicks it.

 

At September’s Creative Hub we ran a little scenario. Richard commissioned Woody to draw a treefrog for him. As soon as she drew it, it was copyrighted for her lifetime and 70 years after. If Richard wanted to use the treefrog for a range of T shirts, Woody might offer him a license for a certain time period. Richard gets his treefrog, Woody gets her money, so that’s fine then…

 

Woody’s deal with Topshop ran exactly along those lines. But when she walked past a shop in Brick Lane and found one of her designs on a T shirt, she found out it had been copied by a student and sold on. The feeling, she explained, was one of redundancy - a personal assault. But she engaged a lawyer, rallied her social media troops to spot other copies and fought back.

 

By this time we were all feeling slightly nervous, with mutterings of, “I must go and check my T & Cs.” So Dean Marsh of Creative Law talked us through the steps you should take to protect your work. He offered plenty of practical advice and case studies with gratifying amounts of legal wiggle room and sheer audacity.

 

Time, then, to ponder the words of T.S Elliot. ‘Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different. The good poet welds his theft into a whole world of feeling which is unique, utterly different from that from which it was torn.

 

And if that’s got you thinking,  go buy, beg or (no, not steal) a copy of Austin Kleon’s ‘Steal like an Artist.’ It will show you how to use the art of others as inspiration - how to steal well.