Copyright? Copywrong.

There are a few important things you should know about me before reading the post below:

1. I work in the book industry and have for many, many years. As an industry, we are very interested in protecting the rights authors have in the intellectual property they create.

2. As evidenced by this website, I’m a soon-to-be published author. Egmont USA paid me an advance and is going to pay me a royalty on every copy of my book you (whoever you are) buy. Each sale brings me one step closer to every author’s dream — freedom from the day job. (ANd I have a great day job but I still want that freedom.)

3. I think people who create content for a living — words, music, images, moving images — deserve to be compensated for their work. I really, really do.

It’s against this backdrop that I tell you that I’ve come to the conclusion that copyright sucks. Well, sort of.

In my book, The Scar Boys, I use a snippet of a song lyric to head each of the 40 chapters. And when I say snippet, I mean snippet. Two examples:

“Thunderbolts and lightning, very, very frightening…”

—Queen

“Gives me the shots, gives me the pills, got me takin’ this junk, against my will…”

—New York Dolls





In fact, the New York Dolls quote above is the longest of the 40 snippets I use. I figured such a small sample of text would be protected by the Fair Use doctrine of the copyright law. (In case you’re not familiar with Fair Use, see this article.) Nuh uh.

My own research, along with the lawyers employed by my publisher, suggests that using even a few words of a song lyric or a poem could constitute infringement, and that “music publishers are fierce and protective and tend…to charge a lot of money.”

So I am, right now, in the process of trying to clear permissions for each of these 40 snippets. This is turning out to be a Herculean effort. You have to track down not just the artist, not just the writer, not just the music label, but the publisher. Once you do, you’re likely to find out that the publisher employs a secondary publisher to handle reprint licensing. When you finally get to the right entity, when you finally gather all the information they need to process your request, you wait. And then you wait some more.

Okay, sure, my complaint so far is more about the process than protection of the copyrighted material. But that’s not my only concern. Here’s my beef:

Isn’t it better for the writers of “Pills” (the New York Dolls song), to have public references to the song that in no way infringe on the potential sale of the music? I mean think about it. How many people today even remember this song? Suppose my book sells through its 10,000 unit print run (a pipe dream, I know, but you have to start somewhere). That’s 10,000 people (not counting pass through) that get exposed to the existence of a song that almost none of them know exists. And they want me to pay them? Shouldn’t this be the other way around? Shouldn’t I be able to collect some sort of marketing placement fee?

Okay, I don’t really mean that, but you get the point. The bottom line is that I’m likely to give up my pursuit of permission and find some other, public domain method of teasing each chapter of the book. That’s a lost opportunity for each of the writers/artists I was trying to quote.

I really would like to know what you think…