Brief question. Suppose I really like a poem that has two words in it. If I wrote the poem down here, would I be breaking the poet’s copyright? What if it was a four-line poem? A sonnet?
Where, in other words, is the cutoff for fair use of very short works? Is the amount of a work you can excerpt for fair use figured as a percentage of the entire work, or is it a set amount that’s the same for a four-line poem and for a twenty-volume encyclopedia?
Daniel
One of the tests for fair use is how much of the copyrighted document is being copied, or, as the law says:
So if you type all of a two-line poem, your fair use defense is very weak if the author chooses to sue you*. Forrest J. Ackerman has copyrighted a one-letter short story; I could type it here and would probably be in violation if he wanted to push it.
There is no set amount, but if you copy the entire poem, it’s hard to claim fair use.
*Since there are other consideration, it’s hard to be definitive as to what might happen in court. However, using an entire work would make it very hard for you to get a ruling under fair use.
Then you’d better hope that 1)he doesn’t want to push it, or 2)the story is “Q”, “X”, or “Z” (in which case I’d better hope that he doesn’t want to push it.
You’d have to include the title for it to be a violation.
There are also stories using a single punctuation mark. There’s at least one story with no text at all.
At least one? Could there be two? And if so, wouldn’t the second one be plagiarism of the first one?
Wow, get outta my head LHoD! I was just thinking about that this morning. There’s a song we sang in elementary school to say good-bye everytime to our music teacher. It’s only four lines long (5 if you include the “cha-cha-cha” at the end) and I was wondering if anyone else has ever sang that song. Without listing the whole lyrics, it’d be pretty hard to get a jist of the song, so I decided against posting the thread.
Has this ever been tested in court? It’s just very difficult for me to believe that if I said, “Bob Smith wrote a story called ‘Harper’s Fairy’ whose entire content consisted of the single letter ‘h’,” I could be successfully sued for copyright infringement.
Does anyone know what the shortest work is that has ever been protected via a court case from infringement? That might help me see what teh parameters are.
Daniel
There is no good guidance from the courts as to what is Fair Use and what is reasonable. Each case appears to make it up from scratch.
My personal opinion is that authors do not have a reasonable expectation that they can exclude the quotation of extremely short works. One of the best known examples is Ogden Nash’s poem, “Reflections on Ice-Breaking.”
People quote this all the time, although probably not in its correct format as given above. Indeed, most people don’t have a clue that it is a poem and has a formal title.
Or that he later added the clause:
Phrases that have passed into the language are almost certainly protected, even if they were originally expressed as poems. “Men seldom make passes at girls who wear glasses” is the prime example of this. It was originally a poem, by Dorothy Parker, entitled “News Item.” Again, correctly, it should be written as follows:
You cannot truly refer to each of these poems without quoting them in their entirety, and thousands upon thousands of people have. I have, in print. Nobody at my publisher said a word to me about it.
There are no set rules. There are no good guidelines. It’s all common sense - until you get to court, at which point anything goes.
The usual advice is to err on the side of caution, but realistically your caution may not be mine and I have no way to express to you the difference.
Although this Ogden Nash poem isn’t what made me start thinking about the subjet, it was another poem by him (“The Duck”).
I do wonder whether you just violated copyright in any meaningful sense. As you can tell, my intuition tells me that you’ve not, but of course the courts don’t really give my intuition the proper respect it deserves.
Daniel
Hey, **Exapno **-
Good stuff, but you left out my favorite 2-word Nash poem!
http://www.poemhunter.com/p/m/poem.asp?poet=6637&poem=110379
(entitled ‘Fleas’).
All of this reminds me of “The Emperor’s New Clothes.”
In these cases of alleged copyright infringement the litigants, lawyers, judge, and jury have no common sense nor any other kind.
Any serious court would assign the whole crew to the looney bin.
Imagine ‘playing’ two recordings of silence and trying to deterime which was which.
Bah. Hum Bug! :rolleyes:
Sigh. RTFA.
Cage’s publishers saw the credit to Cage and put in an automatic claim. Now that Batt retracted the Cage credit nothing is going to happen. It is not really a copyright case about silence; it’s the old story of a clerk doing a mechanical job and sending out the standard letter without any regard to the particulars of the instance.
It makes for a funny news article, but it has no relation to real law. Batt’s playing it for laughs was the best response.
Awesome! This poem is the very poem I obliquely referred to in my OP (technically I guess it’s three words, but it’s written like two). When I was little, I read this poem in the Guinness Book of World Records, as the world’s shortest poem, but I don’t think they included the poem’s title, or else I didn’t get the joke when I was wee. All these many years I’ve known this poem, but had no idea what it meant.
And now I know! Thanks!
Daniel
I’m pleased and proud to sit at the right hand of dorkness.
Exapno did all the homework. I just chimed in with a slightly clearer memory than you.
Thanks for the kudos.
Two things:
“Adam had 'em” is three words, not two.
And according to the copyright office, “Copyright does not protect names, titles, slogans, or short phrases.”
(Emphasis mine.) This suggests the following questions (in my mind, at least):
[ul]
[li]How long can a phrase be and still be a “short phrase”? [/li]
[li]If a work purports to be a short poem, does that somehow exempt it from being denied copyright protection as a “short phrase”? [/li][/ul]
I strongly suspect that copyright of poems is usually applied to an entire book, which probably means that the fair use objections raised above don’t apply. In that case, quoting one poem in its entirety, even a longer poem than those mentioned here, would not be quoting a complete work.
In short, I don’t think there’s a problem.
This is wrong for two reasons. First, poems are often published separately before being compiled into a book, so they can have individual copyright.
Second, a copyright of a compilation does not in any way fail to protect individual pieces of that compilation.
Copying a complete longer poem is quoting a complete work and would not be allowable, in the same way that copying the complete lyrics to a song is not allowable here. It’s just these odd borderline cases that are in dispute.
Hopefully I didn’t miss an answer, but does anyone know of any cases in which a creator has gone to court to defend the copyright of a very short work in circumstances like these? I mean, obviously, if I try to pass off “Fleas” as my own poem, maybe put it on a greeting card or something, I could get in trouble; but what about any cases in which someone has used them in ways that they could normally use short excerpts from a longer work?
Daniel
I understand Ashleigh Brilliant successfully sued someone for copyright infringement over one of his trademark witty phrases that are all 17 words or fewer.
The wording is very important here. Has Ashleigh Brilliant been successful in his many suits? Yes. Has he won cases that have been decided by courts? One, yes, which I’ll touch on in a moment.
Brilliant claims copyright to his phrases, although some people have said that some are not original to him and so do not deserve copyright.
In any case, he files suits whenever he sees these phrases used elsewhere.
Check these IPO archives:
The suit was settled, not adjudicated.
Robert X. Cringely took him on somewhat more directly here, though the following quote is from a “Bob”:
The Cringely piece has a convenient link to this Law Review article:
So what about the case he won? That’s covered in an excellent article on fair use – I May Not Be Totally Perfect But Parts of Me Are Excellent: Copyright Protection for Short Phrases - by the same Richard J. Stim that Brilliant references in the Cringely piece.
So. A long phrase of sufficient originality may be copyrightable, and others can certainly be prevented from making money off the phrase. So may a short phrase.
But what of Fair Use? you ask.
I think this all backs up my original position. The use of a complete short poem in legitimate discussion, review, or commentary in almost certainly protected as Fair Use. But you cannot go on to use the poem in any commercial sense.
IANAL
(Note: I left out footnote numbers where irrelevant.)
