All For One and One for Profit

Increasingly, the rules for acquiring the various permissions needed to reproduce pieces of others' work are getting simultaneously more complicated, confusing, and necessary. Jeevan and I had a talk about what Fair Use really means and how to protect yourself as an author and, by extension, as a publisher.

Fair Use has two main components:

1. There is no specific limitation on how many words, lines, or pages of an original text you may reproduce. What is important is the ratio of the quoted material to the size of the material as a whole. For instance, reproducing one page from a book the size of Moby Dick probably won't cause much of a fuss. However, if you were to reproduce one page from a short story which, in total, is only two pages long, you've just copied half of the whole work. This is when you run into problems.
2. Even if you only copy a small amount of the original text, if the selection you choose reveals the core idea you may still be in trouble. These are the cases that are hardest to judge; two people may have very different ideas on what a work's main idea is. The deciding factor is whether or not by revealing this core idea you have detracted from the original work's potential profitability. If in your review you quote a section of the book which persuades a reader that he does not, in fact, have to buy the book to benefit from its lessons, then you've violated this second principle. In general, this is really only enforced when dealing with new releases; spoiling the ending of The Sixth Sense, for instance (Bruce Willis was already dead!), probably won't cause much of a problem--at least I hope it won't.
   

The best ways to avoid these issues are to:

1. Use your judgment
2. Ask for permission; simply asking in advance can avoid many unfortunate legal problems
3. Cite your sources
4. Ask yourself, "Is this quotation necessary to include in my work?"
   

Protecting Your Own Work

Everything you write is automatically copyrighted. You don't have to do anything; your work is yours and it is protected. You can, and Berrett-Koehler does, go the extra mile and register your work with US Copyrights Office. This legally protects your work more firmly because it includes a date of registration and so guarantees you a claim to First Usage. If someone else claims that you stole their manuscript, you can merely direct them to the Copyright Office and prove that you got there first.

But maybe you're not sure that you really did get there first.

No problem. All the copyrights and trademarks are archived and available to the public at USPTO.gov. Even if you're not conducting research, this website is really interesting to explore. Try running a search for the silliest word combinations you can think of and odds are someone else not only thought of it, too, but went to the trouble of registering it with the government.