question: the cut-throat field of calligraphy law

[devi]

Say I designed a poster with a piece of text on it (for example, a poem by Leonard Cohen or a paragraph from 'On the Road'), printed a small number of copies and sold them on places like ebay or to friends. What would the legal issues be there? Could I only use text that was in the public domain? If I did use text from a book or poem, would I be covered by just adding in a copyright symbol, or would I be expected to pay royalties and end up getting sued by men in suits? If so, is there a time limit (100 years after the author's death or something like that) after which it's OK to reproduce their text?

Any ideas?

Comments

[sciamachy.livejournal.com]

You'd probably get away with a single-line quote, but otherwise you'd have to get permission and like as not pay royalties of some kind. Many artists and their estates are reasonably cool about it though - they won't charge you so much that you couldn't afford to do it and cover the costs in the price.

[kauket.livejournal.com]

I would _think_ that you are not allowed to make a profit out of other people's work without giving them a share of that money. Selling to friends you could probably get away with, but I wouldn't put them on ebay.

Ask secretrebel, she's used quotes from other authors in her books and it is probably a similar situation.

[arachne.livejournal.com]

I think it's 40 years after the author's death that stuff becomes public domain.

De minimis curat lex

[addedentry.livejournal.com]

Copyright persists for 70 years after the author's death (with various qualifications for anonymous and multiple authorship).

Copyright inheres even in small extracts - as you will have noticed in the acknowledgments on the verso of title pages whenever a song lyric is quoted in a novel. I assume that these acknowledgments imply a fee has been paid to the publishing company.

Whatever you do, don't listen to anyone who says 'fair use' - it is a defence against copyright infringement, but not a guaranteed defence.

On the other hand, how are they gonna find out?

[triskellian]

Firstly, kauket is right, secretrebel has hit this problem. She wanted to reproduce a small chunk from a poem at the beginning of each chapter of a book, and she had to find out whether or not each was within copyright. For the ones that were, she had to personally approach the copyright holder asking for permission to reproduce, and then (at least for most, and possibly for all), she had to pay a fee. Some of the fees, IIRC, ran into the hundreds of pounds, and in at least one case, she was refused permission to use the extract.

If you're just selling stuff by word of mouth, among your friends, you're probably OK. If you're not, bear in mind that some paranoid large corporations employ people to trawl the internet looking for various intellectual property infringements.

Secondly, a possible useful resource in finding stuff that's in the public domain: Project Gutenberg. They have downloadable text versions of thousands of books that are in the public domain.

Fair use

[anam-uk.livejournal.com]

Is very very limited, IIRC (IANAL and other dubious acronyms) it has to constitute less than 10% of the whole text, and not re-interpret the authors meaning in anyway, I'm also reasonably sure that if you are selling it on then its automagically not fair use, though I could be wrong (I've only encountered it in public exhibitions, & have usually asked permission if possible).

Anyhow I still have an idea for a comission, but I'd like to see the digital photos of the last peices of work :> oh an dhow do you feel about legibility ?