Sharing Brian’s poems
“I’m happy for you to share my poems! Please just remember: Attribute, Don’t Sell, and Don’t Change.”
— Brian J. Mueller
Every poem Brian has published is released under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International license. In practice that means three things.
Say whose poem it is. Brian J. Mueller’s name, and ideally the book it came from and a link back here. Read one aloud, print it in a program, pin it to a noticeboard, put it in a newsletter — just name the poet.
No commercial use. Don’t put a poem on a mug, a card or a T-shirt for sale, and don’t sell a collection that contains one. Sharing it with people is welcome; charging them for it is not.
No derivatives. Reproduce the poem whole and as written — every line break where Brian put it. Don’t edit it, don’t excerpt a fragment as though it were the poem, don’t set it to different words.
Where to find the poems
All of them are free to read at brianspoems.com, searchable by word or phrase, and any single poem can be saved as a PDF. Nothing is behind a paywall and nothing requires an account.
Brian can sell his own work — that isn’t a contradiction
A Creative Commons license is a permission the copyright holder grants to everyone else. It does not bind the author. Brian holds the copyright in every poem, so he remains free to publish and sell his own books while the license governs what other people may do.
So the printed volumes are for sale, and the poems inside them are free to read and share. Both are true at once, and deliberately so.
Buying a book supports the poet directly
There is no publisher taking a cut and no advance to earn out. Digital Alphabet Books is Brian’s own imprint, the paperbacks are printed on demand, and what a copy earns goes to the poet. Buying one is what keeps the free collection online and the next book being written.
Asking for something the license doesn’t cover
Plenty of good uses fall outside CC BY-NC-ND — setting a poem to music, including one in an anthology that is sold, printing it on something, translating it, or adapting it for the stage. None of that is refused out of hand; it simply needs asking first.
The license itself
The summary above is Brian’s plain-language version, not a substitute for the license. The authoritative texts are:
This license covers Brian’s poems. It does not cover the cover artwork, the photographs, the Digital Alphabet Books name and logo, or the design of this site. For those, please ask — except the press materials on the press page, which are there to be used.