Considering quoting song lyrics in your book? A primary question to consider when quoting song lyrics is the importance of the lyrics to your message. If they are important, do you need permission from their copyright owners to use them in your work? It is often wise to clear copyright on even a line or two of song […]
Territories – Its Place in Copyright Compliance As Sally Ride once said, “All adventures, especially into new territory, are scary.” If you have recently entered the publishing business, possibly as a self-publisher, a key decision you will have to make is in which territories you plan to distribute your works. Questions regarding sales and distribution can be […]
For the last three weeks we have been covering the use of secondary sources. We talked about avoiding a halt in production of our work or a DMCA takedown notice due to an unwise use of secondary sources. We talked about how and where to look for items in copied content that may be from […]
As we have pointed out in Part I and II of Secondary Sources, it is wise to seek out secondary sources in a search for original ones, but remember that often these sources will not serve an author in the same way original sources do—in any attempt to comply with copyright law. Below are some […]
More and more, we are seeing our own clients inadvertently make a use of secondary sources that constitutes infringement. This occurs most often today in uses of material obtained from websites, blogs, and aggregators. Publishing content from the Huffington Post, photos taken from Pinterest, text taken from Facts on File, and still images taken from […]
For independent publishers doing our own publicity, there are so many options to choose from that even making a choice of what activity to devote our valuable time to is difficult. One activity that appeals to many authors in today’s Internet world is making our own video in order to draw readers into the realm […]
We creatives know there is nothing new under the sun. We know that art and literature thrive, in part, because creatives in these fields have so much wonderful work from which they may glean ideas for new works. And there is much public domain content that can be used to legally create derivatives. A derivative work is […]
So many of us learned early on in school that copying is OK as long as we give credit. I work with self-publishers often who have taken that lesson to heart in a big way and then hit a brick wall when trying to publish. Now, some copy with no thought of the right or […]
It is often said a picture is worth a thousands words. Sometimes we as self-publishers forget to consider the worth of a photograph or an image and what it contains. It is true that some photographs may not have sufficient value attached to them to qualify for copyright protection because they add nothing unique to […]