Can I can legally use these song lyrics as book/chapter names?
This topic has been discussed--but please advise me on this particular test case.
The title of the fiction novel is "Shorter of Breath" -- a reference to a lyric in Pink Floyd's "Time."
Chapter names have song lyrics and titles, such as
3: Look up to the skies and see
4: I understand about indecision
7: And if you listen very hard
8: Someone saved my life tonight
One of the subplots of this very silly story is a time-traveling group of novel characters who become music critic terrorists and decide to remove Starship's "We built this city" from history by attacking the band members in 1985. The band name and song are referred to, and occasionally quoted:
"A fictional character named Mucho from a Pynchon novel waved his beer and ranted to the assembly, “‘Corporation games!' 'Listen to the radio!’ How long will we have to accept this profanation!”"
How much of this should I remove / change / tweak / abandon? Thank you in advance.
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IANAL, but I personally don't see the issue... There are probably well over a million songs out there throughout the history of the modern era of music. Each CD has what 15 songs a minimum? If you were to go through every artist, big name or no name, each year, dating back to the first time lyrics were recorded on paper we would be in a lot of copyright troubles. The point being that... there are only so many combinations of words before they come up again. Even within lyrics, there are phrases that are repeated. Yes there are trade mark lyrics to a song as @RoBtA pointed out that pretty much everyone knows, but if you asked me to name what songs your chapter titles came from or even the name of your book, I wouldn't even have known they were from songs personally.
Definitely check with a lawyer about this or someone who actually has knowledge in the legal fields, but I find the titles vague enough that they can be passed off for as general phrases even though your inspiration was from songs. Everyone has inspiration, and that inspiration is usually found within the body of work you do. Painters inspired by Vincent van Gogh may show a little bit of his art style. musically... Blake Shelton (a country music singer) has been dating a female singer named Gwen Stephani (was in a Ska band later went solo pop). In one of Blake's songs, he made a reference to one of her CD titles when she was in No Doubt. "Gonna put a little Rock Steady on your hand" - Gonna by Black Shelton. While this isn't directly like yours... people still often use inspiration in their body of works.
This post was sourced from https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/27634. It is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.
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IANAL, but questions of this sort fall under the doctrine of fair use, which may differ from one jurisdiction to another. Generally, fair use says that there are certain exceptions to the protection provided by copyright law that allow people limited use of those material for specific purposes such as criticism or parody. Fair use is described here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use.
Of course, no one here can tell you with any certainty if your proposed use constitutes fair use or not. If you submit your work to a publisher, they are probably going to be extremely conservative in interpreting the fair use doctrine and are likely to insist on your getting permission from the copyright holder even in cases that you may think are clearly fair use.
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