fair use

[rm]

I'm having a little woe thing about an essay of mine that's about to
be published that includes two quotes from two different songs. The
longest quote is 12 words. The essay is not criticism but personal
non-fiction that's about love and survival. The anthology is a
commercial effort, but unlikely to produce significant returns for
myself for the publisher. Does this fall under fair use? And if so,
does anyone have a link I can provide the publisher, or else I'm going
to have to gut the essay, which is annoying especially when trying to
engage such matters from afar on a tight deadline.

Any and all grumpiness here is not related to the publisher, who's a
doll for catching this and making an effort to solve it at this late
date, but the fact that it's early in the morning in Zurich and I'm
jet-lagged.

Merci!

Comments

[firefly124.livejournal.com]

Most of my knowledge on fair use has to do with educational or other non-commercial use. I think, though I'm not sure, that you may need the copyright holder's permission for any for-profit (even minimal-profit) use, though there may be an exception if the quoted bit is a small enough percentage of the larger work. No links though, sorry. :-(

[heron61.livejournal.com]

I just read about fair use, and fair use can apply for commercial material quoting small sections of something, and 12 words of an entire song is fairly short, but there are also no guarantees.

[delchi.livejournal.com]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use

Yeah , I know it's wikipedia, but the text is rather good and addresses all four requirements under US law. If you are under the law(s) of other countries, there are some links for other countries.

[delchi.livejournal.com]

More detailed , and full of test cases : http://fairuse.stanford.edu/Copyright_and_Fair_Use_Overview/index.html

[sethg]

Unfortunately it's not enough to convince your publisher that it would win a copyright lawsuit; you'd have to convince them that your quotations are so obviously covered by fair use that the publisher wouldn't bother suing in the first place.