copyright-chain-300x225.jpgHere’s a post which is, sadly, almost as telling as the “Happy Birthday” copyright saga in showing the corrupt folly of current creative rights policy. Writer David Hewson warns: “Never quote a rock lyric in a book unless you’re rich.” And he recounts his own experience with his 1996 publication Epiphany:

My then publisher and editor loved it, and went on to do very well with it too. But they pointed at the lyrics and said… you do have permission for these, don’t you? Permission? These were just snatches of words from some of my favourite artists of all time.

Hewson actually did the honest thing and started tracking down the rights holders. “Trust me, it’s hard. For starters a lot of the lyrics aren’t actually owned by the people who wrote them. Just take a look at the odd company names you’ll find attached to them.” In the end, he listed a professional to help, but this didn’t improve matters much:

Boy was this illuminating. The Rolling Stones? I’d have blown a big part of my advance if I’d wanted them in there. If I recall correctly one line from Street Fighting Man (you know, that great anti-capitalist anthem) would have set me back a grand alone. Some copyright holders didn’t want to know at any price. Others just wanted a small fortune. A few settled for a few hundred quid and they were the ones I used. But it was a terribly slow process.

And note that that’s a grand in UK pounds circa the mid-1990s, equating to quite a sizable figure in today’s dollars.

“When it was over I swore I’d never use rock lyrics in a book again,” Hewson concluded. He did renege on his vow somewhat in later works, but still concluded ” I’ll never use a quote that requires permission again.”

I’m extremely surprised that such use of lyrics isn’t covered by prevailing fair use doctrine. According to Stanford University Press’s guidelines, “a fair use is any copying of copyrighted material done for a limited and ‘transformative’ purpose, such as to comment upon, criticize, or parody a copyrighted work. Such uses can be done without permission from the copyright owner.” And the guidelines list “quoting a few lines from a Bob Dylan song in a music review” as one example of fair use. However, they also warn that “millions of dollars in legal fees have been spent attempting to define what qualifies as a fair use. There are no hard-and-fast rules.”

Other sources warn that, although “you do not need permission to include song titles, movie titles, TV show titles—any kind of title—in your work,” when it comes to poems or lyrics, “because songs and poems are so short, it’s dangerous to use even 1 line without asking for permission, even if you think the use could be considered fair.” Other sources quote similar warnings.

You’d think that the framing of a single line from a well-known song lyric in a dialog or scene from a novel is about as transformative a use as you can get. Apparently not. With millions of dollars spent on lawyers to prove just that.

So remember, popular culture doesn’t belong to the people. Not under current copyright law anyway. It belongs to those who can sequester it. Your past and your feelings, your memories and passions, your culture and heritage, are not yours to share. Not while any rights holder can get a lock on them.

View story at Medium.com

1 COMMENT

  1. In “The Nature of Copyright,” noted American constitutional scholar L. Ray Patterson points out that law grows out of a combination of legislation, court decisions, and custom, and that “consistent private action can essentially ‘make’ law” by suggesting customs that courts may honor.
    Thus, following a publisher’s self-serving guidelines on fair use or abandoning one’s fair use rights entirely in order to avoid possible litigation all have the effect of shaping the relevant law via custom. Ultimately, the courts will construe these actions to mean that fair use is unimportant to authors. If you don’t use it, you loose it.
    So publisher intimidation of authors with respect to fair use results in “rights atrophy” among authors and more revenue for publishers.

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