Online, and the rights you keep

Posting a poem publicly is publication, so the poem stops being unpublished work. The copyright stays with the writer, but the platform is granted a broad licence in the terms nobody reads. And a video is a different object from a poem, with more people's rights inside it than the poet's. None of that is a reason not to post. It is a reason to know what has been given and to whom.

What posting a poem online does to it

Posting a poem online publishes it, in the sense every editor uses, and that single fact changes what can be done with it afterwards. A poem is one piece of writing, and poetry is the art it belongs to, so a poem is to poetry what a song is to music. Once that poem sits on a public account, a magazine looking for previously unpublished work will usually treat it as taken, and a competition may disqualify it under a rule about prior publication. Submitting a poem covers how to declare a poem's history honestly, and Ways a poem reaches other people sets the online route beside the four others.

3 distinctions decide how much a post actually costs the writer. A private account shared with 40 friends is not public, though it is one screenshot from being so. A recording of a performance is not the poem on the page and some magazines treat the two differently. And a poem posted in a workshop space that requires a login is generally not counted at all. Anthologies and magazines both state their own rule, and the rule that governs is theirs.

What a platform can and cannot do with a poem

A platform can do a great deal with a poem and it cannot own it, and both halves of that sentence come from the same paragraph of the terms of service. In accepting the terms, a user typically grants the company a worldwide, non exclusive, royalty free licence, which it may transfer and sub license, to host, store, copy, adapt, display and distribute what they post, for as long as the account exists and often for a period after it is deleted. That is what allows the poem to appear in feeds, be resized, be captioned automatically and be shown to people the writer has never met. The licence is non exclusive, which is the important word: it does not stop the writer publishing the same poem anywhere else.

What a platform cannot do is become the owner. Ownership moves only by an assignment in writing, signed, and nobody assigns copyright by tapping a button. A platform also cannot promise that other users will behave, which is the practical risk: a poem is quoted without a name, reposted with an image over it, or read aloud by somebody else with their own credit attached. Most large services set thirteen as their minimum age in their own terms, and the Information Commissioner's Office publishes a code for online services likely to be accessed by children that shapes how those services handle young users' data in the United Kingdom.

What the writer still owns afterwards

The writer still owns the copyright afterwards, in full, and owns two further rights that are worth naming. Copyright arises automatically under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, which applies in England and Wales, in Scotland and in Northern Ireland alike, with no register, no fee and no minimum age. Moral rights under the same Act include the right to be identified as the author, which has to be asserted in writing, and the right to object to derogatory treatment of the work. Performers' rights, in Part Two of that Act, belong to the person who said the poem out loud, so a recording of a reading needs the performer's agreement as well as the writer's, even when they are the same person and the request comes from a school.

What this means in an ordinary week is small and concrete. A poem taken from an account and printed elsewhere without permission is an infringement, and a polite message asking for it to be taken down or credited is the normal first step. A poem someone has set to music, filmed or translated is a new work built on the old one, and permission for that is the writer's to give or refuse.

A video of a young poet needs more than the poet's consent

A video of a young poet performing needs consent from more people than the poet, and this is where schools, youth clubs and well meaning parents most often get into difficulty. 6 permissions sit inside one clip filmed at a showcase:

• The writer, for the poem itself.
• The performer, for the reading, under performers' rights.
• A parent or guardian, where the young person is under eighteen, normally through the organisation's written photography and filming consent form.
• Everyone else in shot or audible, including the audience and other performers.
• The venue or the school, which usually has its own filming policy.
• The rights holders in any music used behind the reading, which is why so many clips are silenced automatically.

The copyright in the film belongs to whoever made it, which for a clip shot at a school event is usually the school rather than the person holding the phone, so a young writer who wants it taken down later is asking an organisation to act. Getting that agreed in advance, in one sentence in writing, takes a minute and saves an argument. Consent is also not permanent: a young person who withdraws it should be able to have the clip removed, and an organisation that cannot do so should not have posted it.

What cannot be taken back

What cannot be taken back is the copy somebody else already has, and everything else here follows from that. Deleting a post removes it from the platform, not from the screenshots, the reposts, the downloads, the messages it was forwarded in, or the search results that may take weeks to catch up. Spoken word poetry is often written out of the hardest thing in a young writer's year, which is what makes it good and also what makes it a poor first candidate for a public account. 2 habits cover most of it: post the poem a week after writing it rather than the same night, and never post anything that names a real person's private business, a home address, a school uniform or a timetable. The poem will still be there in a week. The version of the writer who wrote it will have moved on, and gets a vote.