Just as one would cite sources for a research paper the author should give credit and cite sources for a book.
I would think it depends on how big a part of YOUR book this will be. If you quote 5 pages of someone’s book, add 1 page of your own commentary and published it as a 6-page Kindle e-book, that is hardly “fair use.”
Don’t mistake giving someone “exposure” without their permission a substitute for real permission.
I deal with copyrights. I have copyrighted works, and I have licensed copyrighted works of mine and from others.
Fair Use applies to mainly a scholarly work or if you are reviewing the work to include a small abstract of it. But even so, I still seek copyright permission.
There are many business and practical benefits for seeking copyright permission. Think of it as a business networking opportunity. If gives you access to the copyright holder to discuss your project which can lead to better opportunities for you that you may have not even considered. They might like what you are working on that they can recommend you to a publisher.
But even if someone simply says you can get permission in exchange for X, they often can supply you with a better media copy of what you are seeking, or additional information from their own research that they didn’t include in publication for numerous reasons like space, or their book editor wanted to save it for second book that never got published.
What you never want to do, is be sued. People don’t realize that being used isn’t like a one hour TV show. It drags on for years and is even expense, time consuming and soul crushing. There isn’t someone to look over the forms filed and kick it back saying “You can’t sue for that”. It will takes months until you get to court to even discuss this before a judge and by then, your life can be made a living hell.
Always seek permission, not matter what it is. Sometimes during the negotiation you might not come to terms which you are happy with. But any time that has happened it led me down another path which ended up being better than if they had just given me permission without any problem.
You want to contact the copyright administrator which is most likely the publisher of the book. Contact the publisher and start from there.
I’m not a lawyer, but I don’t see any way how five pages could be considered fair use.
I believe the publisher is “Hay House.” From the FAQ on their website:
“How do I reproduce material from a Hay House work?
E-mail the Editorial Department with the exact text you would like to use, its source, and the context in which you would like to use it. We will evaluate your request and respond as soon as possible.”
You told us that you wanted to use it in a book.
Being dishonest about this kind of thing is likely to leave you in a much worse position legally than if you were up-front about your true intentions.
Citation of sources as one would do for a research paper is necessary for purposes that have nothing to do with copyright law.
Copyright law does not regulate ideas. You can steal all the ideas you want without violating copyright law. What you must be careful about doing is copying expression. If you infringe a copyright, citing sources won’t save you.
Good god, is this statement as wrong as it can possibly be.
Seek permission if that’s what your lawyer advises you to do. Do not make these decisions without competent advice for a book you intend to publish.
Please, I beg you, do not take any action or omit any action based on what you read in this thread. No one here is your lawyer. No one here is legally obligated to look out for your interests. No one here has the full facts or has done the research necessary to advise you.
Could you point out some situations in which asking for permission would cause serious complications? It’s not clear what exactly you’ve been warning against.
Incorrect.
Fair use, as a part of the larger Title 17 (linked above by edwardcoast), applies to basically anything that can be covered by copyright. You can make fair use of a scholarly book or article; you can make fair use of an artwork; you can make fair use of a TV broadcast.
And, to be honest, i think that seeking copyright permission for a proper act of fair use is counterproductive. The fair use provision is in the law precisely because the law recognizes that there are, and should be, occasions where it is perfectly appropriate to use a portion of someone else’s intellectual property without asking the copyright owner’s permission.
That’s exactly what i was wondering.
Asking permission leaves you no worse off than you were before asking, and if the copyright holder is feeling generous you might even be allowed to use more than would be provided for under fair use. It doesn’t change your rights under the principles of fair use, and nor does it change your obligations to respect copyright.
If you DO violate copyright, the question of whether you did or did not ask permission first will be largely irrelevant. And if you do NOT violate copyright, it will be similarly moot.
I wasn’t dishonest. I initially considered writing a book but by the time I emailed the guy I thought I might make a booklet or website
If you ask for permission and the answer is “no,” then what? You give up the idea? And then what if you later consult counsel who says, “this really does look like fair use, but now that you have asked for permission and have been refused, if you go ahead with it anyway and there is a legal problem, this is going to look bad.”
Because I recently had a conversation with one of the county’s top entertainment lawyers who said exactly this—if there’s some question as to whether it would be infringing or not without authorization, have your counsel look very carefully at the totality of your situation before you ask for permission, because if you get a “no,” that puts you in a worse situation if you later decide that what you’re doing isn’t infringing and you want to go ahead with it anyway.
If what you’re doing is clearly infringing then yes you should ask permission, but you should let a competent lawyer decide exactly how to ask permission for something like this.
Because the way JohnClay has described his message to the author, I would think that there is very little chance that he’s going to get a “yes”—some stranger on the Internet with a detail-free story wants permission to coy an entire chapter? If he responds at all, he would be crazy to say yes: he makes his living off of his work.
And he’s more likely to send it to his lawyer who will offer a detailed “no” that will serve as evidence of willful infringement if he goes through with it and they decide to sue.
I thought that might be it. That is a correct lawyerly answer.
I’m not giving advice but merely stating a fact that while such an extreme scenario is possible it is also rare. For the vast majority of cases, a simple request for permission to quote a small segment will be given quickly and freely by almost everyone. The cost of the most basic lawyer’s time will be prohibitively expensive and utterly disproportional to the value of the quote.
If you are on the wrong end of an exception, then you will wish you had taken out insurance. As with all matters of insurance, you gamble the cost of disaster against the odds of it occurring.
I don’t think very many authors are going to consider copying an entire chapter of a book to be a “small segment.”
Now, it very well may be that copying it is indeed fair use—although it is rare that copying a full chapter is fair use, we don’t really know enough about JohnClay’s situation to say that it isn’t—but the author is very unlikely to have the kind of objective viewpoint to concede that.
And, yes, of course, the relative costs of hiring a lawyer need to be taken into account.
And here is a key question: What is JohnClay’s intent and hope for this project? Does he have a serious desire to write something that will be published as a book (an e-book, perhaps) and will be sold for money? Even if his ambition in this regard is modest or unformed, if he is taking publishing seriously, he needs serious advice.
But if this is just a hobby or a casual project, and he doesn’t really care if he has to abandon it if he gets a “no,” then, meh, okay.
As far as my intentions go it depends on how successful the diet is for me (I’ve only been on it about 3 days) and whether I can get friends to follow the diet and how they go.
I have no idea whether this particular example would fall under fair use or not. A list is different from a chapter. It is intended to be used as whole. From the little context we have, it might fail its purpose if not quoted in full. The author may be more likely to accede to a request for the whole list than for a part.
Two issues here. One is that my statement was a general one, not advice in this one case. Two, the OP commits the sin that is almost universal in OPs about writing: he wants advice and refuses to give out any of the information necessary to give even an educated layman’s answer. Nothing we say can possibly help him properly. Here’s what I should have said in my first post.
If I’m smart I’ll save that paragraph and plunk it down next time we get a fair use question.
Just to be clear, in not saying that it’s not fair use or that the amount of copying tilts away from fair use. I don’t know in this case whether it’s a reasonable amount to copy or not.
I’m saying that when you walk up to an author and ask him or her out of the blue whether you can copy an entire chapter, the author’s instinctive reaction is going to me “that’s a fucking huge amount to copy.”
The author may very well be wrong, but you want to craft your request in the optimal way to override that instinct. That’s why you should be careful not only whether to ask but how you ask—being sure to emphasize the lack of harm and abundance of benefit to the author’s interests from the point of view of the author, because if you ask and get a “no,” you’re on a worse place than where you started.
If you ask, you want to maximize your chances of getting a “yes,” and to to that you have to understand that “copy an entire chapter” to an author is going to immediately into the “no fucking way” column.
If your use actually is a fair use, and you know it, and you have good advice telling you it is fair use, you should definitely do it without asking permission. Fair use is your right. Don’t ask.
And I totally agree with you that we in this thread are talking without knowing any of the important facts.
That’s why I am urging JohnClay not to make any decisions that might affect his legal position based on what he reads here.
What is an example where it is?