Very good piece in this morning’s Wall Street Journal by Tony Woodlief on the issue of copyrights:

Further, this editor noted that one reason literary anthologies and college-course syllabi have replaced classics with less edifying sources like newspaper articles and diaries is simply that major artists in the American literary canon are too expensive to procure en masse, if not totally off limits. The estates of William Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway have historically restricted which stories can be used in anthologies, which means that students often have a narrow exposure to two of our country’s finest writers.

I think Woodlief explains clearly the pros and cons of current copyright laws and concludes that, as implemented today, they might actually be a curse. The piece is very easy to read – the author recalls his own experience of wanting poems at the start of each chapter in his recently published memoir Somewhere More Holy. (I highly recommend the book, and so does John J. Miller).

The poem that best describes my experience is “The Odyssey,” navigating as I did between the Scylla of non-responsive copyright holders and the Charybdis of fee-seeking attorneys.

The whole thing is here.