two good reasons for copyright protection

Here’s a new ad campaign by Home Depot. Scene opens on a suburban woman in khaki shorts and a summer hat, the sun hitting her muddy calves, making them sparkle as she walks through a manicured backyard: “I have done it again. One year in every ten I manage it-- A sort of walking miracle, my skin bright as a Home Depot lampshade.” Male Voice Over: “Come to Home Depot and get lampshades that will make you glow in the dark.”
Here’s a commercial idea for Victoria’s Secret. A woman walks down a crowded New York City street in her underwear, bare foot and black sunglasses, her footsteps literally smoldering in her wake, as all sorts of men watch her in awe, as a sexy female voiceover speaks: “Herr God, Herr Lucifer. Beware. Beware. Out of the ash. I rise with my red hair. And I eat men like air.” Then a handsome man in a business suit, with a freshly plucked rose, stands in her path, and she walks right through him, disintegrating him. Male voiceover comes in as the screen fills with smoke: “Victoria’s Secret—it will bring out the man eater in you.”
I know poets, such as Robert Desnos, have worked in advertising before, but that should be a choice that each poet makes.
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Last year C.K. Williams was talking to a class of mine at Sarah Lawrence, and he lifted the galleys of his Collected Poems and said that he was “holding his life’s work”, as he gripped the five-hundred or so pages in his hands, almost like a baby. It was poignant—this smart, passionate, insightful human had focused his energy, had given the best parts of his life to a brick of paper. (I am reminded of Merwin’s line: “I who have always believed too much in words.”) Williams does not leave a skyscraper in his wake, rather 500-plus pages of poems, read by relatively few of his fellow citizens. Despite a small readership, he (and other poets) should be afforded the same copyright protections as musicians, film makers, fiction writers, painters, etc. We are not sub-artists.