Sam Leith ruminates on the unsettled "rules" and sometimes ridiculous costs to quoting poetry in a work of nonfiction. The article is here at The Spectator. Below are a few snippets.
It was both a courtesy and the right thing to do to seek permission to quote their work. . . . But the A.A. Milne estate was asking what seemed to me a crazy amount of money to quote a single couplet from that poem about Christopher Robin saying his prayers – and my publishers advised me, if I didn’t want to pay, to snip it out. Which I did. The rights holders for another author of verse, who shall remain nameless here, not only asserted that ‘fair dealing’ legislation – the provision that allows you to quote without permission – didn’t apply to their author but claimed an absolute right of veto on any quotation for ebooks or audio.
Poetry, I was told, is very dangerous. Not as dangerous as pop lyrics (everyone agrees that they are ‘a nightmare’. . .) – but much riskier than prose.
The problem here is not exactly the law. The problem is that nobody wants to test the law. As media lawyer David Hooper put it when I asked him: ‘Copyright law is distinctly unpredictable and expensive to litigate, which puts the copyright holders in quite a strong position.’
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