Goldsmith on Poetry & Copyright

Dear poets, we are privileged to live in an economy of no economy. Let me refine that: our economy is purely an intellectual one, not a financial one.
I have no copyright restrictions on my work—economically or legally—in perpetuity. I don't believe that the result of my lifetime's labor will have any economic ramifications, even long after my death.
I don't doubt that it will have intellectual ramifications, though, but those consequences are entirely based on the work being made freely available for all. If I were to propose an economic model, the entire premise of my work would be undermined.
Putting on my UbuWeb editor's hat now, I must say that it is a fallacy that in the field of poetry, your heirs will financially profit from your work as a poet. Sometimes on UbuWeb we see unenlightened heirs holding on tightly with both hands, trying to wring a profit out of their deceased works (fees for reprinting, use on websites, etc.). What they essentially do is pull their beloved's work out of circulation forever, ensuring it's extinction. Little do they realize that by giving the work away, they will have a much better chance at preserving greater longevity for these works. If you can't access them, they don't exist.
Ours is an economy based on plentitude and abundance; the more copies of our work there are out there and the more readily available they are, the greater the impact our works will have. This is in contrast to economic forms based on scarcity: diamonds, paintings, fine watches.
Now I suppose there are exceptions, but they're very few and far between. I've had some rather famous people agree with me when it comes to our free distribution theories on UbuWeb. When the New York Times asked Merce Cunningham if he was upset that we didn't ask his permission to place his audio files (lectures and interviews) on UbuWeb, he responded that he felt that the greater good of having his thoughts out there, freely available, would far outweigh any economic benefit he would receive from them.
Everything I publish I also make freely available on the web. And here's a funny story: A few summers ago, I was taken on an all-expenses paid reading tour of Scandinavia. I read to packed houses, stayed in beautiful hotels, ate marvelous meals, had vast newspaper, television and radio coverage. And the punchline... not a single person in Scandinavia had ever seen a book of mine. All they knew of me was from what I posted on the web. With my books in runs from tiny houses, never totaling over 1000 copies, it cost them more to ship from SPD than the price of the book. Again, friends, if it doesn't exist on the internet, it doesn't exist.