Copyright question

If I understand correctly, everything posted on these boards is copyrighted by the publishers of the SDMB. Is that right?

If I’m working on a poem which includes snippets from things posted on these boards:

  1. Am I legally allowed to submit it for publication without asking SDMB staff for permission?

  2. Am I legally allowed to submit it for publication wtihout asking the individual posters for permission?

  3. Am I morally obligated to ask posters for permission? (The poem doesn’t lift entire quotes–just snippets here and there lifted out of context and recontextualized. Hard to explain. Yes, it’s one of those kinds of “poems.”)

-FrL-

  1. The board doesn’t hold the copyright to everything that you post, you (the poster) still holds the copyright. However, you grant the Reader a licence to use the material you post. Therefore, you do not need to ask the Reader if you want to use your own material in other works.

  2. Depends on how much you copy. If you copy to the extent that it becomes a “derivative work”, or you copy “substantial portions”, then you may be sued. You could do it anyway, and hope that nobody sues you, but it’s hard to say exactly how much is infringing and how much isn’t. “Snippets” sounds like it wouldn’t infringe, but it depends on the importance of what you copied.

  3. Dunno. Ask someone else. =^^= I personally wouldn’t care too much, but Master Wang-Ka would definitely have something to say if you lifted substantial portions of his work, especially since he is selling his work compiled into a book.
    My 2 centivos.

I am not a lawyer. I am not your lawyer. I’m just some dude throwing out WAGs and Wikipedia links.

The OP reminds me of collages; this sounds like a literary collage rather than a visual. Thus, checking the Wikipedia:

Which then takes us to:

Which pretty much says that you can only do it if you have the permission of the original author. However for single line snippets, that seems rather excessive. One can, after all, quote famous lines from movies anywhere you want without needing to particularly worry. “Do not underestimate the power of the Force!” So, let’s check out Fair Use:

Some choice quotes are:

So even here, it looks like one could theoretically make a case against you. However, one will note that in the music case, the things being sampled into the music are also music. In your case (presumably) you would be taking random snippets of dialogue and working them into poetry, not taking other poetry and working it into yours.

My personal bet would be that you are safe to go ahead so long as you don’t take anything more than under a single sentence and don’t take any lines that were in another poster’s poetry. Also, you could post a list of all the quotes and their writers with a “Write if you don’t want me to use this” though I’m not sure how strong a defense that would be in court (when theoretically you could have tried to individually emailed and attain direct permission, rather than assuming implicit permission.)

If you are in no hurry, the safest method is to individually email the posters and seek their permission. Following that with a “Write if you don’t want me to use this” for the sake of posters who don’t have their email listed would probably be fine.

What they said, more or less.

If you wish to republish the work of other posters somewhere else – in real print or cyberspace or whatever – you should get permission from them.

There is probably some “fair use” attribution allowed, but I suspect that would not, for example, allow you to reproduce someone else’s entire posting or an entire thread in toto; you could briefly quote from someone else’s posting but that’s as far as it goes.

You have the right to republish your own postings anywhere you like.

We do tend to take a very conservative approach to copyright issues here and will always err on the side of less rather than more.