Question about quotes

[thedailyreader]

Dear community

I'm busy writing a book that will mainly contain quotes . I wrote all of them myself but I'd love to use other people's quotes too . I wonder if I need any permission for using quotes in my "quote" book if I put the name of the founders in my book as a dedication. Also , if I want to use pictures of people who made these quotes where is the right place to ask permission for this?

Thanks a lot for your time !

[JCamilo]

Usually quoting with credit small parts of a work is legal.

Pictures belong to someone. You must ask to each of them unless they are in public domain.

[thedailyreader]

Usually quoting with credit small parts of a work is legal.

Pictures belong to someone. You must ask to each of them unless they are in public domain.

Thanks a lot for this answer . I appreciate your time. Could you give me any direction where I could find pictures that are in public domain ? ( do you mean paparazzi pictures ? )

[JCamilo]

I am not american, public domain is not the same in each country. Anyways, i think there is a site (www.publicdomain.com) or something similar.

[PeterL]

You probably should ask a lawyer in the publishing business abiut the quotes. While a short in a review or similar is fair use, a book of quotes might be viewed otherwise.

For public domain pictures you should just search. There are many graphics online that are in the public domain, and anything that the government owns in public domain.

[Pecksie]

If the quotes are under copyright (i.e. have not passed into the public domain, usually due to a certain time having elapsed since the author's death), an attribution is not enough. You should contact the authors or copyright holders and ask for a formal, i.e. written, authorization. I know it sounds like a big hassle, but it's the only way to be legally protected. Think of it this way --- I, as a writer, may have written some sentence or paragraph or whatever that you enjoyed, and published it --- but that doesn't necessarily mean that I want to see it in your book, perhaps out of context, etc. etc. There are myriad reasons why an author might get annoyed and begin legal actions against you. It's different, I believe, in the academic area, where people usually quote from other scholars' articles with a proper attribution, and that is enough. But in the realm of art it doesn't work that way.

[mal4mac]

A book consisting of almost all quotes is fine! Get hold of a copy of "Reality Bites" by David Shields to see how it is done. He explicitly set out to regain the freedom of writers like Montaigne, whose essays are full of unattributed quotes, and "Reality Bites" is about that, and an attempt to do it. He gives an account of how the lawyers brought him kicking and screaming to provide a complete list of citations... He puts dotted lines down the pages of citations and encourages the reader to ignore them, cut them out and discard them... :)

"Who owns the words? We do."

For images, do a Google search for the author, click on Images, then click on Advanced Search, then look for those you can legally reuse without hastle.

Wikipedia is also worth looking at - click on an image of the author and you will see exactly what permissions of reuse wikipedia has - they are very careful to only show images for which they have permission. You may be able to copy their images & their permissions text (be careful, though, they are giving thir stuff away free and you are planning to make money... so permissions *may* be valid for them but not for you...)

Example - Faraday's picture on Wikipedia is from R.A. Millikan & H.G. Gale; A First Course in Physics, 1906 - so you can use that (probably) without any problem, it's well out of general copyright. This gives you a general tactic - look for old photos & paintings of the authors!

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Michael_Faraday_Millikan-Gale-1906.jpg