Concordia University Crosses the Copyright Line
Concordia University's Centre for Expanded Poetics is in the headlines, specifically its director Nathan Brown, who has been scanning entire poetry collections before posting them to the centre’s contemporary poetry reading group page. The reproductions in circulation included collections by Canadian poets Damian Rogers and Jeramy Dodds, both published by Toronto's Coach House Books, as well as poetry by U.S. writers, including Claudia Rankine, Ariana Reines, and Maggie Nelson. At the Globe and Mail, the editorial director of Coach House Books, Alana Wilcox, writes "I find it distressing ... Poets make so little money ... making their work available for free on a public website feels very disrespectful. ... These aren't tenured professors with salaries; these are poets who are scraping by, getting no compensation for their hard work." More:
The books, most of which would retail for less than $20, were available to download free to anybody who clicked on a link. Apparently, centre director Nathan Brown has been running books through a sophisticated scanner to produce copies: a picture on the reading group’s Facebook page in January shows him working on a Atiz brand book scanner of a type that costs at least $10,000.
Alerted by calls from both the Writers’ Union of Canada and The Globe and Mail asking whether permission had ever been given for the postings, publishers complained to the centre this week. By Tuesday afternoon, both the links to the books, some of which date back to 2015, and the Facebook post had disappeared.
Contacted at his office, Brown acknowledged the centre was in the wrong. “Posting those files was a mistake that has been corrected,” he said, adding that he will be buying five copies of each book from the publishers – one for each of the five graduate students who usually attend the weekly reading group.
Brown added that the centre’s scanner is also used to create a digital archive of old, out-of-print poetry magazines and said he just wanted to make the books available to students who might not be able to afford them. But the familiar plea of student poverty doesn’t carry much weight with small presses or poets, who often rely on ill-paid university teaching contracts themselves.