Like most people, I don't really bother to read the boiler plate terms of service because they're all the same right?  Hey, I've never read all the way through the terms of service on my own web site....and I wrote it myself.

So, it was quite a shock when I discovered today that I have granted to Open Salon an irrevocable, cost-free assignment of copyright for all the material I've posted on their web site, which leads me to think twice about posting anything else here.

And then I thought about it again.

First of all, copyright is automatically conferred upon any intellectual property from the moment of its creation in any durable form, so the existence of my poetry on my own web site is prima facia evidence of my prior ownership of the material in question.

 So far, so good.

Secondly, in the second paragraph under Article 7,  Open Salon explicitly recognizes the poster's copyright privilege in the process of asserting its right to reproduce any material posted on their website.  Ipso Facto, only the owner of a copyright can assign the copyright.

What this means, in short, is that, while Open Salon can abuse us by republishing our material, no one else can abuse us without Open Salon's permission.

Still not thoroughly mollified?  Neither was I.  Having publishing some 45 poems, some of which aren't completely incompetent,  after having held some of them close to my chest for more than 40 years, one might excuse me if I felt like I've just been raped, because I have.

It's rather like being date-raped, dosed with a roofie and waking up the next day with no clear recollection for the event, not even a decent post-coital let down....but my reputation is intact as long as I don't tell anyone, right?

I'm sure that the owners of the Open Salon web site (notice that I resolutely spell that horrible word both ways) are quite confused by the occasional outbursts of anxiety among the posters who feel violated by the terms of service.

After all, they're providing - free of charge, you remember - with a valuable service, hosting our blogs and helping us to gain an audience for them, and even sharing the advertising revenues, such as they are and if there are any.  What more could we ask for?

It's a two-way street we're on here.  They have no web site without us, and we have no audience without them because, let me tell you the truth if you haven't figured it out yet,  the vast majority of the millions of websites out there don't draw that much interest from the universe.

It's also a Mexican stand-off of a sort.  If they start abusing our work by selling it to second or third parties (second parties being other media outlets and third parties being the ultimate consumers of our work product) we'll find out about it sooner or later and then there will be hell to pay.... bad publicity, law suits, wholesale exodus of posters, and bad news all around.

But the reason this is a true Mexican stand-off (with apologies to Latino readers; there's really no better term for it) is that the people at Open Salon can't tell the difference between the sow's ears and the silk purses.  I don't know how many posts there are on Open Source, and I'm not sure anyone else does either because it's a fast moving target, but I do know this much:  there's too many of them for their staff to cull through to find the diamonds among the cubic zirconia.

This is analogous the problem of mass surveillance systems.  If we put everyone in the world under surveillance, who does the surveilling.  The more we try to surveill, the more difficult it becomes to identify the bad guys in the wood pile.  (I cleaned that one up.  Don’t flame the flamer. )

By the same token, the sheer volume of material makes it difficult for the good people at Open Salon to figure out what they’ve got that’s worth selling, but that’s the second problem.

The first problem is who the hell are they going to sell it to?

Right now, across the entire publishing industry, there’s a surplus of product and a shortage of market.  Newspapers are collapsing, magazines are fighting rearguard actions against bankruptcy, and publishing houses are publishing fewer new authors each year than they did the year before.

If you’re a pro, you already know this.  If you’re not, then disabuse yourself of the notion that this stuff we’re publishing here is worth anything at all, no matter how good it is.

There’s  a widespread belief among creative people that the quality of their work will eventually find an audience and bring in a pay check.

This is a vicious, self-inflicted and self-destructive myth. 

The truth is that the breaks don’t go to the best; they go to the luckiest. 

For every story about the self-published author who strikes it rich, like Deepak Chopra, there are thousands who haven’t struck anything except the failure of their dreams.

The reality is that it’s a crapshoot, the random factor raising its ugly head among the flowers.   Even if you find a publisher and bring a book to market, the chances are that it will end up on the remainder tables, where I have found really good books written by a selection of friends from various periods in my life. (Mine are not among them because, as a ghost writer, no one knows which ones are mine and which ones aren’t, thank goodness.)

So that’s the final dichotomy:  if, somehow or other, one of your works (or mine) happens to strike fire and begins to draw an audience, then you will be the better off for it because then, at least, your foot will be in the door, and it won’t matter at all whether or not you make anything off that particular item since it’s the momentum you want and need, not the few bucks you might have gotten from a particular sale.

Where do we go from here?

Well, I, for one, have decided to keep publishing here because, well, it’s fun to get an occasional kudo or the periodic brickbat…but thank you for helping me to think this through and get it off my chest.