Using Copyrighted Song Lyrics
I read this Accordion Guy post about copyright issues related to reprinting song lyrics when it whizzed past me last week and am just now writing something about it. I quote song lyrics fairly frequently in my tagline here and on another blog. Some of my blogging colleauges do, also. I always thought what I did constituted fair use because I only use a few lines from the song instead of posting all of the lyrics. Maybe I should stop quoting lyrics all together …
November 30th, 2004 at 8:49 am
there’s a huge difference between quoting lyrics on a free-for-the-world blog and quoting them in a book you’re going to get paid to publish. I think the Radiohead charges were insane, frankly, but if we start censoring ourselves because of fear of nebulous laws that we’re not even sure we understand [much less with no good precendent cases] we do ourselves and our patrons a disservice. Or get around it like I do, and just quote Thoreau a lot
December 5th, 2004 at 2:37 pm
Lots of the U2 fan sites got letters from Universal this week, threatening legal action unless they took down the lyrics on their sites. What’s distressing about this is that the fan-site lyrics were generally taken from the actual recordings, and so differed from the printed lyrics included with the albums. On the fan sites, you got the correct lyrics as performed, including changes and variations from live performance.
I don’t plan to take my lyrics down. They are part of my legitimate research project on religion, culture, and politics, and as such seem to constitute fair use, as far as I can tell.
December 6th, 2004 at 12:01 am
Apparently to some people in the recording industry, there isn’t much difference between posting lyrics in a place that won’t make money and using them for commercial purposes. That’s a little disappointing, but I can kind of understand why they might not have the lyrics out there.
Thanks for sharing the news, Nate!