You wrote "tens of dollars from eager formalist poets." A good profit. Certainly better than a penny for your thoughts. From this I conclude that poets are coming up in the world. A fortune is out there waiting to be made. Well, a few bucks anyway.
On another subject, friends and I got together recently and purchased the OED on CD. It took us all of two weeks to determine how to copy it.
Since then it's been like the old testament story of the loaves and fishes. Of course, we had to determine first on what merit basis friends should receive their copy. Was it mere friendship? Should they give blood. Or did they have to perform some function? Paint our house, say, or whatever duty.
Money was not what we wanted. We were a strange lot.
Turned out many CDs were sent out with no rigid demands. Why, because pirates are really nice folks, you know. They're beast to copyright laws.
(I mention the OED CD because the CD version allows you to search and save whatever entry. The OED has hitherto been limited to folks pouring over the many volumes, often hoping to run into the right stuff.)
Same thing went for the much coveted JD Salinger's Uncollected Short Stories. A file no bigger than a quarter megabyte, and now has made the rounds by email to every eager-beaver reader.
The pirates never died. They just went on the net.
Anyone looking for the Salinger file can find it on the newsgroups or sharebear.com or whatever filesharing application.
------------------
|