Law Commons^™

Copyright Infringement And Poetry: When Is A Red Wheelbarrow The Red Wheelbarrow?, Jennifer Understahl

Vanderbilt Law Review

Copyright does not protect facts or ideas, but only an author's original expression. Often, though, it is difficult to distill protected expression from unprotected ideas or facts that reside in the public domain. Copyright protection for poetry is particularly problematic because a poem's ideas are often intertwined with a poem's sounds, shape, and images. It is often not only difficult to extract ideas from a poem's surface, but once ideas are "discovered," it may even be difficult to articulate exactly what these main ideas or themes are. William Carlos Williams' poem, The Red Wheelbarrow, one of the most famous twentieth …