o one possesses the exclusive right to permit, withhold permission, or charge fees for permissions to quote from Emily Dickinson's texts. Newly available documents at Brown University's John Hay Library reveal the extra–legal basis of ownership claims on the writings of the Amherst poet. 1 These documents suggest the probable failure of any attempts at monopoly within Dickinson publication, including digital publishing. In the history of the division of the manuscripts, no individual or corporation has ever been able to assert exclusive rights. The present account outlines how those failures originate in a number of lapses, loopholes, and ambiguities around the question of who owns Emily Dickinson materials. The legal uncertainties involved in the copyright status of Dickinson texts have been and can continue to be a boon for prospective publication, paradoxically furnishing the" creative incentive" that copyright was originally designed to protect. The basis for asserting that no one owns exclusive rights in Emily Dickinson texts appears in the first professional study of ownership of Dickinson copyrights. That study was conducted by Philip Wittenberg following Millicent Todd Bingham's gift of Dickinson materials to Amherst College. His letter outlining the copyright situation, which may be consulted at the John Hay Library at Brown University, is an invaluable aid to understanding the problems surrounding the issues of intellectual property involved in Dickinson texts. His analysis has particularly important consequences for the ongoing publication of Dickinson materials, since he pointedly questions the concept of common–law copyright in perpetuity—the very concept on which any exclusive claims to the works of a long–dead author are based. Such understandings provide the foundation for the contractually based arrangements that allow for conventional as well as electronic publica-