Contributor Licence

Finish The Poem

Last updated: 19 August 2026

This is the agreement covering what we may do with the poems you post. It is

short on purpose. If any of it is unclear, ask before you post.

1. You keep your copyright

You own everything you write on Finish The Poem. Posting here does not transfer, assign, or reduce your copyright in any way. You remain free to publish, sell, licence, perform, or reprint your own work anywhere else, at any time, without asking us and without telling us.

We do not claim ownership of your writing. We never will.

2. What you grant us

By posting a verse, you grant Finish The Poem a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free licence to do the following, and only the following:

(a) Display it on the site. To publish, store, reproduce, and display your verse on Finish The Poem and its apps, including in the daily feed, the archive, search results, and on your profile.

(b) Share it on our social accounts. To reproduce your verse, in whole or in part, on official Finish The Poem accounts — currently @finishthepoem on X and Instagram, and any future official account — for the purpose of promoting the site and the work published on it. Your handle will always be shown.

(c) Include it in the annual anthology. To include your verse in a printed and/or digital anthology published by or on behalf of Finish The Poem, credited to your handle, subject to Section 4 below.

(d) Format it. To make minor typographic adjustments — line breaks, spacing, font — needed to display or print your work. We will not alter your words.

This licence is non-exclusive: you can do all the same things with your own work, at the same time, without restriction.

3. What we will never do

We will not:

• Sell your individual verse to a third party
• License your work to another publisher
• Publish your work without your handle attached
• Change your words
• Use your work to train a machine learning model, or permit others to do so
• Claim your work as our own

4. The anthology, and how to opt out

We intend to publish an annual anthology collecting notable work from the site. Selection is based on echo count together with editorial judgement. Contributors are credited by handle.

You may opt out at any time. There is a setting in your profile — "Include my verses in the annual anthology". Switch it off and none of your work will be considered for any printed or digital collection, past or future, regardless of echo count. You do not need to give a reason, no one is notified, and nothing else about your account changes. You may switch it back on at any time.

We check this setting at the point each anthology is compiled. If it is off when we compile, your work is excluded from that edition.

If an anthology has already been printed containing your work, we cannot recall physical copies that are already in circulation. We will exclude your work from all subsequent editions and reprints.

Payment. We are not currently able to pay contributors for anthology inclusion. If an anthology generates revenue beyond its production costs, our intention is to share it with contributors, and we will contact you before any such distribution. Nothing in this section is a binding promise of payment.

5. Deleting your work

You can delete any verse from your profile at any time. Deleting:

• Removes it from the site, the archive, and search
• Removes it from consideration for all future anthologies
• Does not recall social posts already published, or printed copies already distributed

If you delete your entire account, all of your verses are removed from the site and from future anthologies.

6. Your promises to us

By posting, you confirm that:

• The work is yours, written by you
• It does not infringe anyone else's copyright or other rights
• It does not breach the Community Guidelines
• You are old enough to enter this agreement — 16 or over, or the age of digital consent where you live, whichever is higher

If you post work that isn't yours, we will remove it, and you are responsible for any claim that results.

7. Duration

This licence lasts as long as your verse is on the site, and — for anthology editions already published — for the life of those editions.

If you delete a verse or your account, the licence ends for all future uses. It does not retroactively unpublish what has already gone out.

8. Changes

If we need to change this licence, we will tell you before the change takes effect and give you the chance to delete your work first. Changes are not retroactive: work published under an earlier version stays under that version unless you agree otherwise.

Questions: finishthepoem@tatewickenterprises.com