Hi Boz

PS to my reply in the last message to you on another string, If someone is dead I believe it is ok to quote their work after they've been dead 70 years. Just check on it yourself to be sure. Look in The Writers and Artists Year Book in your library or get a copy from your local book shop. It is a very useful book.

Good luck with your research on this. I wonder if you could contact someone else who has written a book in the same genre for advice too.

Catherine

Hi there,

Thanks for your tuppeny's worth.

yes, I didn't mean to imply that because it was in the public domain, it somehow wasn't copyrighted. What I meant was that it was there to be promulgated, and if it wasn't, it wouldn't have been put out there for public consumption in the first place.

I have since learnt that there's a thing called 'fair dealing' which I found thanks to the other poster, thus:

'Quotations for ‘purposes of criticism or review’: If the quotation can be regarded as ‘fair dealing … for purposes of criticism or review’ (a phrase not defined in the Copyright Act), whether of the work quoted or of another work, you need not ask permission, but must ensure that either in the text itself or in an acknowledgements page you give the title and the author of the work quoted.'

I found this on the Permissions page of The Society of Authors website.

Boz

I'd go with "it's easier to ask forgiveness than permission".

Few people understand copyright, fair use, parody, permission, etc, and the law itself isn't really clear enough to give you either protection or fair warning.

You could, for example, create a character who only ever responds with sentences from Stephen King novels. You would not have to ask permission and there is no copyright problem. Ah, but imagine if you created the same character and they only responded with lines from Beatles songs or from Harry Potter. You'd be sued and the litigators with the deep pockets would win (I mention HP and Beatles because I am aware of litigious copyright behaviour in the past).

You could create a book of quotations and sections of other published work and publish it all without asking anyone for permission. But then it's likely someone would come forward and try to claim your fair use wasn't really fair use or the criticism you may have written wasn't really criticism or perhaps they just want a chunk of your money and so off goes legal action.

Unless you've quoted massive slabs of work, you're probably ok ... unless it is work from notoriously litigious copyright holders.

So, the answer after all that is still it is easier to ask forgiveness than permission. And yes, acknowledgment pages will help a little.