Always get legal advice, or if in doubt, leave it out. If you are going to include a quote, do it well. Ensure you're quoting the right person and not someone who pulled those lines from someone else. Over time, the wording of quotes changes in common usage. Many famous passages are commonly attributed to a specific author, despite them not being the original creator. A couple of popular examples:.
Sometimes the word 'seldom' is seen as 'rarely,' but 'seldom' is the correct wording. The quote is often attributed to Marilyn Monroe—and could be seen as something she would say—but this quote is actually from a essay by historian and Pulitzer Prize winner Laurel Thatcher Ulrich.
This line is attributed to Voltaire but was written by one of his biographers, Evelyn Beatrice Hall, in her book The Friends of Voltaire.
As with many misquotes, it was paraphrasing the famous person's attitude and was eventually mistaken for being his own words. Type your quote or a pertinent phrase into your internet search bar and see what you find.
There is usually a wealth of places where your quote appears: novels, textbooks, magazines, and even music. You will have to sift through this sometimes monotonous array of info to find the pieces that are most helpful to your intended use of the quote. This might be historical discussions, literary pages, comedic relief, etc.
Wikiquote a great resource that has quite a lot of reader-supplied research. If you're not selling your work, you can almost always go ahead and use any quote on it you want, under what's known as the Fair Use Rule more information about that here.
Again, I'm not a lawyer and this blog post is not a substitute for real legal advice. If you want to use a quote on your wedding invitations or put a quote over a picture of a sunset and post it on social media, that's fine. But when you start profiting from someone else's intellectual property , you need to comply with intellectual property law.
What happens if you don't comply? In some cases, nothing. It's up to the person you're quoting or their estate if they're no longer alive, or the movie studio or company that owns the rights to the quote if it's from a movie or TV show, etc. This is why there are tons of Etsy shops selling stuff featuring Steve Jobs quotes, etc.
However, the more work you sell, whether it's on Etsy or wholesale, the higher-profile you become, and the more likely it is that you'll get busted for breaking the law. If this happens, the first step will generally be a cease-and-desist letter from the quote owner's attorney, telling you that you are in violation of copyright law and instructing you to stop selling the offending products, but there's also the possibility of getting sued and having to pay hefty settlement and legal fees.
Here's the thing, though: It is really not cool to profit from someone else's intellectual property without their permission, even if you can technically get away with it. If you're an artist, you'd be pretty pissed if another artist put your hand-lettering on their work and sold it without your permission -- and with good reason!
It's just a really unethical thing to do. And that, more than the fear of Steve Jobs' people coming after me, is why I don't do it. In fact, when I started to feel really boxed in creatively by being limited to using pre quotes, I started writing and selling my own stuff, which is what led to my card line and was the smartest thing I could have done! For further reading and clarification on this topic, here are a couple of links that I have found helpful:. In the magazine's article about the memoirs, only words from Ford's ,word manuscript were quoted verbatim.
The Supreme Court ruled that this was not a fair use because the material quoted dealing with the Nixon pardon was the "heart of the book In determining whether your intended use of another author's protected work constitutes a fair use, apply the golden rule: Take from someone else only what you would not mind someone taking from you.
This will help, should you ever need to defend your actions in court. When it comes to fair use, unpublished works are inherently different from published works. Publishing an author's unpublished work before he or she has authorized it infringes upon the author's right to decide when and whether the work will be made public. Some courts in the past held that fair use never applies to unpublished material.
However, in Congress amended the fair use provision of the U. Copyright Act to make clear that the fact that a work is unpublished weighs against fair use, but is not determinative in and of itself. The information provided on this site is not legal advice, does not constitute a lawyer referral service, and no attorney-client or confidential relationship is or will be formed by use of the site.
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Grow Your Legal Practice. Meet the Editors. In some situations, you may use another person or entity's copyrighted work without asking permission. Understanding Fair Use Writers, academics, and journalists frequently need to borrow the words of others.
For example: Andy, putting together a newsletter on his home computer, reprints an editorial he likes from a daily newspaper. Phil, a biographer and historian, quotes from several unpublished letters and diaries written by his subject.
Regina, a freelance writer, closely paraphrases two paragraphs from the Encyclopedia Britannic a in an article she's writing. Sylvia, a poet, quotes a line from a poem by T.
Eliot, by way of homage, in one of her own poems. Donnie, a comedian, writes a parody of a famous song that he performs in his comedy act. Uses That Are Normally Considered Legally "Fair" Subject to some general limitations discussed later in this article, the following types of uses are usually deemed fair uses: Criticism and commentary: For example, quoting or excerpting a work in a review or criticism for purposes of illustration or comment would normally be fair use.
A book reviewer would be permitted to quote passages from a book in a newspaper column as part of an examination of the book. News reporting: Summarizing an address or article, with brief quotations, in a news report constitutes fair use. A journalist would be permitted to quote from a political speech's text without the politician's permission.
Research and scholarship: Quoting a short passage in a scholarly, scientific, or technical work for illustration or clarification of the author's observations would be deemed acceptable. An art historian would be able to use an image of a painting in an academic article that analyzes the painting.
Nonprofit educational uses: When teachers photocopy limited portions of written works for classroom use, this is normally acceptable. An English teacher would be permitted to copy a few pages of a book to show to the class as part of a lesson plan. Note that she would not be permitted to photocopy the entire book.
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