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How To Legally Quote Song Lyrics in Your Stories, Books and Articles
If you’re quoting song lyrics to add flavor and atmosphere or to progress the plot, you may want to read further.
I wrote a short story that used a few song lyrics from Pink Flyod’s “Wish You Were Here”. Fortunately, before publishing, I stumbled across an eye opening article on copyright infringement specific to song lyrics.
Before I proceed further, let me first state “I am not a lawyer” and I am not offering legal advice. I am expressing the copyright laws as I interpret them.
In general, copyright protection for works created after January 1, 1978, are for the life of the author plus 70 years.
Song lyrics are copyrighted. As copyrighted material you will need to acquire permission to use them in your writing. While acquiring rights are simple in principle, the execution is problematic. We’ll go into this a little later, because if you’re thinking the way I did, you’re thinking you can skirt around the copyright issue by invoking fair use. Not so fast my fellow writer, let’s examine that first.
Fair Use
There are no specific laws regarding how much of someone’s material you can use under the fair use doctrine. For the…
