# Citing other people's pictures and text

**URL:** <https://boards.straightdope.com/t/citing-other-peoples-pictures-and-text/453254>\
**Category:** Factual Questions\
**Created:** [June 17, 2008, 9:03pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/citing-other-peoples-pictures-and-text/453254 "2008-06-17T21:03:02Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 3\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![Sattua](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/sattua/32/11906_2.png) [@Sattua](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sattua)\
**Post date:** [June 17, 2008, 9:03pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/citing-other-peoples-pictures-and-text/453254/1 "2008-06-17T21:03:02Z")

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I would very much like to post some entries on my blog with Seamus Heaney’s bog body poems and pictures of the bodies that each poem was written about. The poems are obviously not my own work… neither are the pictures, which I would grab from various museum websites. What is the correct way to cite things so that no one gets kerfluffled about it? Is there any correct way? Is my project doomed from the start?

(the poems are all quite old and reproduced in many other places on the net, if that matters)

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**Author:** ![Tim\_T-Bonham.net](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/46a35a/32.png) [@Tim\_T-Bonham.net](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Tim_T-Bonham.net)\
**Post date:** [June 17, 2008, 9:27pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/citing-other-peoples-pictures-and-text/453254/2 "2008-06-17T21:27:44Z")

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[QUOTE=Sattua]  
(the poems are all quite old …  
[/QUOTE]  
What specifically do you mean by “quite old”?

Pre-1923 – then they are public domain in the US, and you can reproduce them, print them in a book and sell it, anything you want, generally.

Otherwise, he (or his heirs) probably still hold the copyright on them, and all you can do is quote a small part of them under the ‘fair use’ legal doctrine.

See Project Gutenberg’s info [here](http://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Gutenberg:Copyright_How-To)  
for more details on this.

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**Author:** ![Sattua](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/sattua/32/11906_2.png) [@Sattua](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sattua)\
**Post date:** [June 17, 2008, 9:29pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/citing-other-peoples-pictures-and-text/453254/3 "2008-06-17T21:29:25Z")

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[QUOTE=t-bonham@scc.net]  
What specifically do you mean by “quite old”?

Pre-1923 – then they are public domain in the US, and you can reproduce them, print them in a book and sell it, anything you want, generally.

Otherwise, he (or his heirs) probably still hold the copyright on them, and all you can do is quote a small part of them under the ‘fair use’ legal doctrine.

See Project Gutenberg’s info [here](http://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Gutenberg:Copyright_How-To)  
for more details on this.  
[/QUOTE]

I guess I meant, “more than 17 years old”, which I had some vague idea was an important age for texts. They were written in the 1970s.

Please don’t rag me about having said “quite old”. I majored in 18th-century English literature and should have known better. It was a momentary lapse. I promise I’ll never do it again.