Question about fair use and a book relying on another book

[Gregory]

Let's assume that for a non-fiction book I want to both critically discuss and use as the primary source a book by a different author. Since I'll have to quote or at a minimum paraphrase extensively from the latter, I'm wondering if you can do that under the "fair use" laws. I'd assume so, since otherwise one could never extensively review a book with unique ideas or information. But I'm not really sure; perhaps there are some established boundaries or rules to keep things from becoming mass plagiarism.

I'd appreciate any thoughts about this topic. TIA.

[Andre Jute]

Gregory wrote: "Let's assume that for a non-fiction book I want to both critically discuss and use as the primary source a book by a different author. Since I'll have to quote or at a minimum paraphrase extensivel..."

Gregory, is this a whole book-length volume of your own, in which the other writer's book will be the only one discussed?

That's a worst-case scenario. It's doable, but if you're a new writer it is dangerous because the line between fair use and theft is vaguely ill-defined.

Plagiarism, by contrast, is very sharply defined as word-for-word, or very close, use of big chunks of someone else's text without acknowledgement -- the key is "without acknowledgement", letting people believe by direct claim or implication that it is your own work. Plagiarism isn't, as most non-specialists think, plot or even character similarity, unless there is an absolutely overwhelming amount of it. Forget plagiarism in discussions of literature as property; it is more relevant in textual, i.e. literary discussions than in legal ones. If quoted material is enclosed in curlicues or rendered in italics or bolded or otherwise separated, and the source acknowledged it is by definition not plagiarism. Quotation may be grossly beyond fair use and still have nothing to do with plagiarism if the quotation rules are observed.

In general you can discuss someone else's ideas at any length, as long as you don't quote all of his words, or the major part of them, or the major part of any distinct section or self-standing part (like a poem or an essay), and as long as you add substantial ideas and comment of your own so that your text outweighs the direct quotations by multiples rather than fractions. It's a matter not of rules but of judgement.

If you want an example, Stieg Larsson: Man, Myth & Mistress is a book-length discussion of the trilogy written by Stieg Larsson. His publishers, trying to stop adverse criticism, before publication threatened the authors with lawyers for unspecified causes. We ridiculed them. They went away. They didn't even try the "beyond fair use" shill on us because they knew we would add considerable knowledge and opinion of our own, and not fall into the trap of quoting too much. I don't want to sound patronizing, but it really is a matter of experience and the judgement that comes with experience. You can only learn by doing it.

However, if you're already aware of the pitfalls, as you appear to be, it becomes a technical matter of learning to step up to the line but not crossing it, sometimes a bit frustrating as you have to give up something juicy to preserve the balance between someone else's work and your own contribution, but definitely doable if you keep *balance* firmly in mind for each section of your book as well as the overall impact.

Nobody ever said writing books is the easy option.

[Gregory]

Thank you for your meatty summary of the issues. Maybe this will illustrate my matter a bit more clearly:

Let's suppose something completely ludicrous--you read a book, from a esteemed scientist, supposedly proving the Earth is hollow and in fact not just hollow but filled with living humans. You have followed his arguments and realize, to your amazement, he is almost assuredly on to something. However, there is a problem: you have deteremined he is essentially correct about the fact it is hollow, but it is actually *not*filled with humans--it is filled with unicorns.

He figured this out all on his own, doing things like taking soundings of the planet and discovering vast echos, and plumbing lines in caves he's dug into the depths of the world and a great deal more.

So, you decide to write a book exposing this unique theory to the public (his book had some success but you think not as much as it should) along with your take on the situation. You are capable of and fully expect to summarize those silly old ideas about our planet having a molten core and the rest being rock and water and so forth, and you will have some (perhaps not extensive but vital) new research of your own to support your theory. However, without mentioning most of this pioneer's intricately arrayed information proving Earth's true hollow nature, your ideas will not seem coherent. So you are really left with no choice but to present his list of arguments and pieces of data nearly verbatum, if also sectioned off as to keep them in proper context with your own ideas.

I think I see what you mean about there being a perhaps squirrelly line to straddle. And I guess I'm arrogant enough to figure I can know how close to tack it just by virtue of the fact that I'm a very experiened reader, if also in fact not a (published) writer.

[Andre Jute]

Gregory wrote: "Thank you for your meatty summary of the issues. Maybe this will illustrate my matter a bit more clearly:

Let's suppose something completely ludicrous--you read a book, from a esteemed scientist, ..."

Scientific papers and discussions are allowed a greater latitude than in, say, writing biography or history. If we're talking about real science here, not Velikovsky alternative universes or Erich von Daniken aliens or crop circles or suchlike, which may be protected as popular fiction, I think your problem, while it may still require sensitive handling, has suddenly become smaller than before. It is standard practice in to set the existing state of knowledge as a framework for what you have to say, in many cases personalized to a particular scientist's most recent book or paper.

[Gregory]

This actually involves a criminal case, so I suppose it might lie somewhere between a scientific dispute and general non-fiction as far as "framing".

Thanks, this has been very helpful.