# Song lyrics and copyright violation
**URL:** https://boards.straightdope.com/t/song-lyrics-and-copyright-violation/437050
**Category:** About This Message Board
**Created:** [February 10, 2008, 6:06pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/song-lyrics-and-copyright-violation/437050 "2008-02-10T18:06:44Z")
**Posts on this page:** 20
**Page:** 1
### Author:  [@NajaNivea](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/NajaNivea)
#### Post date: [February 10, 2008, 6:06pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/song-lyrics-and-copyright-violation/437050/1 "2008-02-10T18:06:44Z")
One of the mods want to help me out here? I posted some lyrics, which I estimated to be approximately ten percent of the total lyrical content of the song–a section I selected purposely to demonstrate my point.
According to the [US Copyright Office](http://www.copyright.gov/title17/92chap1.html#107) ,
[QUOTE=US Copyright Office]
107. Limitations on exclusive rights: Fair use40
Notwithstanding the provisions of sections 106 and 106A, the fair use of a copyrighted work, including such use by reproduction in copies or phonorecords or by any other means specified by that section, for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research, is not an infringement of copyright. In determining whether the use made of a work in any particular case is a fair use the factors to be considered shall include —
(1) the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;
(2) the nature of the copyrighted work;
(3) the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and
(4) the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.
[/quote]
Seeing as how no one is infringing upon anyone’s potential market value, and I followed the rule of thumb for approximately ten percent of the total and _still_ had my post chopped, is there any reasoning for the “four or five lines” rule, when the widespread rule of thumb for all works is ten percent? We aren’t restricted to “four or five lines” of an online article or “four or five lines” of a scientific abstract, but are expected to keep the sample at or below ten percent of the total content, correct?
Partly I’m irritated that the sample posted is no longer really representative of the whole piece and thus no longer serves the purpose of being posted in the first place, but mostly I just want to know what the reasoning is for disallowing representative quotes of song lyrics in particular.
This isn’t so much a complaint as a request for clarification, so I didn’t want to put it in the pit, but if it belongs there, please move it. Thanks!
---
### Author:  [@Gfactor](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Gfactor)
#### Post date: [February 10, 2008, 6:14pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/song-lyrics-and-copyright-violation/437050/2 "2008-02-10T18:14:07Z")
[QUOTE=NajaNivea]
We aren’t restricted to “four or five lines” of an online article or “four or five lines” of a scientific abstract, but are expected to keep the sample at or below ten percent of the total content, correct?
[/QUOTE]
[QUOTE=The Rules]
You agree not to post any copyrighted material unless the copyright is owned by you or by the operator of the SDMB, except as permitted by the “fair use” provisions of the U.S. copyright laws (in general this means brief excerpts only). You agree to abide by the wishes of the board moderators in interpreting and enforcing these rules. Refusal to cooperate with board moderators or to abide by these rules is grounds for revocation of your posting privileges.
[/QUOTE]
Where does it say ten percent in there?
---
### Author:  [@NajaNivea](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/NajaNivea)
#### Post date: [February 10, 2008, 6:16pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/song-lyrics-and-copyright-violation/437050/3 "2008-02-10T18:16:32Z")
Well, it doesn’t–I was just going by the generally accepted rule of thumb, and was surprised to see that the board’s rules for copyright violation of song lyrics appears stricter than the rules for other media.
If the answer to my question is “because I’m the mommy and I say so” then… well, okay then. I just thought there might be some logic to it, but I certainly could be wrong.
---
### Author:  [@BJMoose](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BJMoose)
#### Post date: [February 10, 2008, 6:32pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/song-lyrics-and-copyright-violation/437050/4 "2008-02-10T18:32:34Z")
Forgive the possible hijack, but I’ve always wondered how one applies the Fair Use Doctrine to something like that well-known seven-word couplet by Ogden Nash that begins - uh - well - hmmm - the thing starts with a “C” and ends with an “r”. (See what I mean? To quote even one word is to reproduce fourteen percent of the content!)
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### Author:  [@Gfactor](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Gfactor)
#### Post date: [February 10, 2008, 6:33pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/song-lyrics-and-copyright-violation/437050/5 "2008-02-10T18:33:09Z")
[QUOTE=NajaNivea]
Well, it doesn’t–I was just going by the generally accepted rule of thumb, and was surprised to see that the board’s rules for copyright violation of song lyrics appears stricter than the rules for other media.
If the answer to my question is “because I’m the mommy and I say so” then… well, okay then. I just thought there might be some logic to it, but I certainly could be wrong.
[/QUOTE]
The ten percent rule isn’t a real rule; nor is it a rule of thumb offered by anyone credible. \*See, e.g., \* [Fair Use Copyright: A Writer's Guide to Fair Use - Morse](http://www.mbbp.com/resources/iptech/fair_use.html)
We haven’t adopted any such rule here.
It is sometimes used in the context of copying for teachers, which is a very special case. [http://www.techlearning.com/techlearning/pdf/events/techforum/tx05/TeacherCopyright\_chart.pdf](http://www.techlearning.com/techlearning/pdf/events/techforum/tx05/TeacherCopyright_chart.pdf)
[http://www.umuc.edu/library/copy.shtml](http://www.umuc.edu/library/copy.shtml)
Even so, the ten percent rule isn’t even in the official guidelines for that: [http://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ21.pdf](http://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ21.pdf)
That said, I didn’t see the excerpt to which you refer, so I don’t know if I would have let it go or not.
---
### Author:  [@NajaNivea](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/NajaNivea)
#### Post date: [February 10, 2008, 6:39pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/song-lyrics-and-copyright-violation/437050/6 "2008-02-10T18:39:28Z")
Okay, well, are there any actual standards, or are we just supposed to guess and wait to see if we get pruned or not? **SkipMagic** says “one quick stanza,” but one of the quotes I posted was only _half_ a stanza out of a song with a hundred and twenty-seven lines of lyrics and was still chopped.
---
### Author:  [@Gfactor](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Gfactor)
#### Post date: [February 10, 2008, 7:28pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/song-lyrics-and-copyright-violation/437050/7 "2008-02-10T19:28:47Z")
Heh, I forgot this bit:
> [@](#):
>
> What’s the policy on copyrights?
>
> * * *
>
> Our sponsor, the Chicago READER, has a strict policy on respecting copyrights and copyrighted material. They don’t want their stuff used by others without permission, and so we don’t use stuff created by others without permission. Basically, The policy is : don’t do it.
>
> The rules of the Straight Dope Message Board are enforced by volunteer moderators who are not all legal experts in these matters. So we offer a set of guidelines that may be more conservative or stringent than the law in your jurisdiction, but that we think may help avoid the copyright violation issue. In this as in many other matters we depend not only on moderator enforcement, but also ask for the cooperation and goodwill of our posters.
>
> Suggested guidelines:
> (1) If you are going to quote something from an article, **quote less than 5% of the source.** Include a link to the article if the article is available online.
>
> (2) Only quote directly in very rare circumstances. Instead of repeating a source word-for-word, read the article, attempt to understand it, and rephrase what it says in your own words. Again, include a link to the source if the source is available online. Otherwise indicate a reference to the source (e.g. Science News, issue x, pages yy-zz).
>
> (3) Minor changes in quoted text are permitted, as long as such changes are clearly identified (e.g., ellipses … for omitted material, square brackets for added material, etc.) Changes that alter the tenor or interject editorial comment are not permitted. If you want to comment on a quote, do it outside the quotation marks or quote tags.
[http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?p=7696968#post7696968](http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?p=7696968#post7696968) (Emphasis added.)
So when I said:
> [@](#):
>
> The ten percent rule isn’t a real rule; nor is it a rule of thumb offered by anyone credible. See, e.g., [Fair Use Copyright: A Writer's Guide to Fair Use - Morse](http://www.mbbp.com/resources/iptech/fair_use.html)
>
> We haven’t adopted any such rule here.
I was only partially correct (we haven’t adopted a ten percent _rule_; we \*do \* have a 5% guideline). Sorry.
---
### Author:  [@TubaDiva](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/TubaDiva)
#### Post date: [February 11, 2008, 4:45am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/song-lyrics-and-copyright-violation/437050/8 "2008-02-11T04:45:12Z")
For something long we’ll take a snippet and a link to the whole thing somewhere else.
That seems to work for most posters.
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### Author:  [@C\_K\_Dexter\_Haven](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/C_K_Dexter_Haven)
#### Post date: [February 11, 2008, 12:54pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/song-lyrics-and-copyright-violation/437050/9 "2008-02-11T12:54:20Z")
Being very frank here, part of the problem is that the mods do NOT have time to check exactly how long something is and how much you’ve quoted. If it looks long, we’ll snip. For us to go find the original, measure how much there is, and then decide how much you’re quoting… well, we just don’t have the time (or inclination) to spend that much time.
Remember too that we are not trying to live by “legal standards” here. We don’t want to have someone quoting 8% and then have a court case decided in our favor. We don’t want the court case at all. We tend therefore to be stricter than legal necessity.
And, if it matters, we don’t usually record these offenses as “warnings.” It’s not on your permanent record unless you make a habit of it. Most people get it after the first snipping, and don’t repeat their mistake. To err is human, to repeat the same error over and over after multiple warnings is jerkhood.
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### Author:  [@Exapno\_Mapcase](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Exapno_Mapcase)
#### Post date: [February 11, 2008, 4:19pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/song-lyrics-and-copyright-violation/437050/10 "2008-02-11T16:19:27Z")
Song lyrics are a special case when copyright is an issue. Legally there is no minimum amount of lyrics that is fair use to quote. Try using even a line of a song as a heading to a chapter in a novel and see how far you get. Song publishers expect - and get - hundreds of dollars for permission to quote lyrics.
This is obviously impossible to enforce online. I would say that most song lyric sites are in infringement of copyright but the industry has wisely decided that a legal battle against them is a fool’s game.
That does not make the practice any more legal. Copyright is not like trademark, in which violations have to be vigorously fought. You can pick and choose your battles in copyright.
A newspaper site is supposed to know and understand and adhere to copyright and it makes perfect sense that the Reader would be extra vigilant on these boards. If this means that extended critical discussion of lyrics is made harder by not being able to quote them at length, that’s the price paid.
Just to repeat what’s already been said, I wish that the urban legend about 10% being fair use would get lost already. There are no rules concerning fair use. None. Every individual instance gets looked at separately, and the courts have made that clear in all their decisions.
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### Author:  [@NajaNivea](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/NajaNivea)
#### Post date: [February 13, 2008, 3:02am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/song-lyrics-and-copyright-violation/437050/11 "2008-02-13T03:02:20Z")
[QUOTE=C K Dexter Haven]
Being very frank here, part of the problem is that the mods do NOT have time to check exactly how long something is and how much you’ve quoted. If it looks long, we’ll snip. For us to go find the original, measure how much there is, and then decide how much you’re quoting… well, we just don’t have the time (or inclination) to spend that much time.
[/QUOTE]
Of course you don’t have the time to go babysitting–I was only asking for guidelines on how to know how much is okay, due to my previous (and evidently erroneous) idea that there was a generally accepted percentage. I dislike the idea that the guideline is “if it looks long”, but if them’s the rules, then… them’s the rules. Is there room in the rules to add a specific “no more than five lines” rule or something similar so that we don’t have to worry about whether or not someone is going to decide my six line quote “looks long” while another guy’s eight line quote looks a-OK?
I find myself breaking out into hives at the idea of asking for more rules, but I’d definitely have chosen other selections from those songs if I knew where the cutoff was.
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### Author:  [@DSYoungEsq](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DSYoungEsq)
#### Post date: [February 13, 2008, 3:05am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/song-lyrics-and-copyright-violation/437050/12 "2008-02-13T03:05:37Z")
Here’s a thought: don’t quote more than a couple lines. Then you know you’ll be okay. And don’t sweat quoting “too much,” because unless you violate that rule repeatedly, or with great gusto, no one’s going to hold having to cut it down against you. 🙂
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### Author:  [@NajaNivea](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/NajaNivea)
#### Post date: [February 13, 2008, 4:23am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/song-lyrics-and-copyright-violation/437050/13 "2008-02-13T04:23:23Z")
[QUOTE=DSYoungEsq]
Here’s a thought: don’t quote more than a couple lines. Then you know you’ll be okay.
[/QUOTE]
Oh man, why didn’t I think of that?! 😉
Maybe because sometimes you need more than a couple lines to make your point. Also because there are active threads now where eight or ten line song quotes aren’t even noticed.
It’s really not that big a deal, I think I’ve only ever quoted a song twice in my entire tenure here, so I don’t want it to sound like I’m all het up about the issue. I was irritated that the mod picked my post to hack but let others in the same forum go by, and was trying to figure out why. It appears that song quotes in quote tags are likely to get cut and quotes that aren’t boxed don’t. Lesson learned, I guess.
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### Author:  [@Exapno\_Mapcase](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Exapno_Mapcase)
#### Post date: [February 13, 2008, 5:05am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/song-lyrics-and-copyright-violation/437050/14 "2008-02-13T05:05:33Z")
Probably more likely that some posts get reported and other posts don’t get reported. So the mods look at the first post and never know of the other posts’ existence.
Mods don’t read every thread. Or every post in the threads they do read. They’ve stated repeatedly that they respond to reports rather than search out errors.
Why was yours reported and others not? Don’t have a clue. I never saw the thread and I haven’t searched it out. But historically reporting tends to be random. Some posts get pounced on and others go by. You say you have no history of doing this, so it’s probably not because people are watching your behavior.
Think of it like getting a speeding ticket after you’ve seen a bunch of people pass you by. You’re guilty, they’re guilty. You just happened to get caught. Nothing personal, just the random [un]fairness of the universe.
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### Author:  [@TubaDiva](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/TubaDiva)
#### Post date: [February 13, 2008, 2:39pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/song-lyrics-and-copyright-violation/437050/15 "2008-02-13T14:39:35Z")
Um, what was the original post? Where was it?
Might be better if we knew exactly what we’re talking about here.
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### Author:  [@Gfactor](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Gfactor)
#### Post date: [February 13, 2008, 2:45pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/song-lyrics-and-copyright-violation/437050/16 "2008-02-13T14:45:00Z")
I assume it was this: [http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?p=9459436#post9459436](http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?p=9459436#post9459436)
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### Author:  [@TubaDiva](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/TubaDiva)
#### Post date: [February 13, 2008, 3:33pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/song-lyrics-and-copyright-violation/437050/17 "2008-02-13T15:33:14Z")
[QUOTE=Gfactor]
I assume it was this: [http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?p=9459436#post9459436](http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?p=9459436#post9459436)
[/QUOTE]
Okay.
How much is too much is of course a judgment call. And we do tend to err on the side of caution.
Again, you’re always best to give a snippet and a link to somewhere else where the entire work may be found.
This is not normally a Warning offense . . . unless you do it a lot and don’t pay attention when we ask you about it. So don’t sweat it.
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### Author:  [@Gary\_Robson](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Gary_Robson)
#### Post date: [February 13, 2008, 7:29pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/song-lyrics-and-copyright-violation/437050/18 "2008-02-13T19:29:40Z")
Just for the record, that 10% rule wouldn’t fly in a courtroom. If you lifted 40 pages out of a 400-page tech book and reprinted it verbatim, the publisher would be all over you.
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### Author:  [@NajaNivea](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/NajaNivea)
#### Post date: [February 13, 2008, 9:03pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/song-lyrics-and-copyright-violation/437050/19 "2008-02-13T21:03:12Z")
Sweet, thanks everyone!
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### Author:  [@Acsenray](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Acsenray)
#### Post date: [February 26, 2008, 12:06am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/song-lyrics-and-copyright-violation/437050/20 "2008-02-26T00:06:13Z")
[QUOTE=Exapno Mapcase]
Song lyrics are a special case when copyright is an issue.
[/quote]
A special case according to what? The Copyright Act creates no special rules for song lyrics. So far as I know there is no well-known doctrine regarding song lyrics. Song lyrics are like any other creative work, so far as I know, and fair use applies to them like it does any other.
> [@](#):
>
> Legally there is no minimum amount of lyrics that is fair use to quote.
Is there a source for this? Again, I am not familiar with any doctrine of copyright law that gives such special status to song lyrics.
> [@](#):
>
> Try using even a line of a song as a heading to a chapter in a novel and see how far you get.
I am guessing that this is a function of the extreme conservative and trouble-avoidance nature of publishers’ legal counsel and not based on any actual distinction in copyright law between song lyrics and other works. Copyright law explicitly does not protect titles, single words, or short phrases. It seems inconceivable that as a legal doctrine, a single line from a song lyric gets such special status.
> [@](#):
>
> Song publishers expect - and get - hundreds of dollars for permission to quote lyrics.
What? Any examples? Again, I have heard of no exception to fair use for song lyrics.
> [@](#):
>
> Just to repeat what’s already been said, I wish that the urban legend about 10% being fair use would get lost already. There are no rules concerning fair use. None. Every individual instance gets looked at separately, and the courts have made that clear in all their decisions.
And I have a notion that – unless someone can offer some legal authority here – that one must be extra careful when applying fair use principles to song lyrics is itself an urban legend.
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