Is a MS containing licensed content a deal breaker?

Gnostic Knight · Feb 17, 2011

I have a dark fantasy novel that I'm finishing about a teenager. Like most teenagers, he likes music and mentions bands by name often. I am almost positive, from what I've read, as long as you're not bashing them in fiction, it's legal to say that the MC listens to Duran Duran.

But, in one of the later chapters, like chapter ten or something, one character sings a song to the MC, and I just can't get around including a few lines to really set the scene.

My thing is, will having a MS with lyrics, which I understand have to be licensed, make an agent go "not worth the trouble?" One person told me that if and when I'm asked for a full, I should include a little note that I use the licenses lyrics and I will go ahead and seek out licensing if it becomes necessary.

Funny thing is, I actually met the guy who wrote the song at a show, Rogue from the Cruxshadows, and he's pretty cool and lets people put up fan vids on youtube all the time, so I imagine getting permission wouldn't be a problem.

But still, it is one of those little things that make me worry...

Anne Lyle · Feb 17, 2011

Gnostic Knight said:
My thing is, will having a MS with lyrics, which I understand have to be licensed, make an agent go "not worth the trouble?" One person told me that if and when I'm asked for a full, I should include a little note that I use the licenses lyrics and I will go ahead and seek out licensing if it becomes necessary.

Sounds about right to me - an agent isn't going to turn down a great book just because you quote a few song lyrics, but you need to be prepared to either cut them or pay the licensing fee yourself. The musician himself may be cool about it, but it's his music publishers (assuming he has them) who own those rights, not him. The music industry works very differently from fiction publishing.

Anyway, cross that bridge when you come to it and focus on writing an awesome book!

Cyia · Feb 17, 2011

Gnostic Knight said:
I just can't get around including a few lines to really set the scene.

Yes you can. You may not want to, but you can. Desire =/= ability.

You mention the song's title and let the reader hear it in their head without using the actual lyrics. It doesn't take quoting the song to know what's going on if you say something like "Everyone in the stands broke into a spontaneous chorus of We Will Rock You." The scene's still set and there's nothing to worry about rights-wise.

veinglory · Feb 17, 2011

There is nothing to stop you from getting the permission now. If you can't you are going to have to rewrite the scene anyway.

Jamesaritchie · Feb 17, 2011

Do not quote song lyrics without permission. This is a deal breaker. It's often a deal breaker even if you do have permission. Stephen King can do this, new writers can't. Permission doesn't work the way many believe, and it often must be gained again, and paid for again, each time a new version of a novel is released, or when the novel goes from hardcover to paperback, or the other way around, or when a movie deal is made, etc. Publishers do not like this. And permission can cost many thousands of dollars. But even if it's free, it can still lead to problems.

Just don't do it. When you show a publisher you can make some serious sales with your novels, things will change. Until then, simply do not use song lyrics. Or poems, or anything else still under copyright.

amyashley · Feb 17, 2011

Yeah, don't. I think you can put in under two lines, but I would stick to a word or two or NONE. The title of the song or the name of the band is fine. Just use those.

Sakura-chan · Feb 17, 2011

I had this same question as well, and after reading the answers I'm a little afraid about using one line from the chorus of a song that's about thirty years old. How does one go about finding out the copyright of a song?

Old Hack · Feb 17, 2011

amyashley said:
Yeah, don't. I think you can put in under two lines, but I would stick to a word or two or NONE. The title of the song or the name of the band is fine. Just use those.

If you quote even a single line from a song in a book you'll have to get permission, and that permission costs. Lyrics are usually prohibitively expensive to quote, and it's usually up to the author, not the publisher, to cover that cost BEFORE a book goes to print.

Just don't do it. It's really not worth the bother for a line or two of writing.

Becca C. · Feb 17, 2011

One thing you could do is invent a band that readers would understand plays a certain kind of music (for example, pretty obvious that Iron Gates of Hell would be a heavy metal band) and then make up lyrics. That could serve the exact same purpose and cost nothing.

tko · Feb 17, 2011

I don't think he can get permission by himself

Permission isn't a black and white issue. He may get personal permission, but that doesn't mean he gets rights for the book. He still needs right for the publisher, that's who needs them. And if he gets right for the book, he may not have foreign rights, movie rights, etc.

Anne Lyle · Feb 17, 2011

It is black and white - either you have permission or you don't. But tko is right - the musician may not have the authority to grant permission.

Deleted member 42 · Feb 17, 2011

amyashley said:
Yeah, don't. I think you can put in under two lines, but I would stick to a word or two or NONE. The title of the song or the name of the band is fine. Just use those.

No you can't.

There are no quantitative requirements in terms of the Fair Use safe harbor; fair use only exists after a judge and sometimes a jury decides that a use falls within the safe harbor guidelines.

That means paying court costs.

Secondly, you can't license content without knowing exactly what rights you need--worldwide? North American? Print only? Digital? And you'll need to know the print run.

And finally, it dates the book.

Make up your own lyrics. Then you own 'em.

johnnysannie · Feb 17, 2011

Mention the song; scrap the lyrics. It's what I did in my novel due out in April and that worked just fine with the publisher.

Jamesaritchie · Feb 17, 2011

Anne Lyle said:
It is black and white - either you have permission or you don't. But tko is right - the musician may not have the authority to grant permission.

It's much more complicated than this. There's no black and white to it. Permission comes in degrees, and it comes for specific uses, places, and times. "I need permission to use such and such in a novel" doesn't cover a fourth of what you really need.

Just asking for permission really has no meaning. It's where, when, why, what, for how long, for which versions, on and on. This is one reason publishers don't like seeing novels with copyrighted material.

It far from"either you have permission or you don't". Unless you're an attorney who specializes in such things, you probably don't even know what permission you need.

IceCreamEmpress · Feb 17, 2011

Using song lyrics is not necessarily a dealbreaker with agents, though some agents might see it as a sign of not knowing much about copyright and publishing.

As for who pays for permissions, maybe Stephen King doesn't, but other best-selling authors have to pay out of their own pockets. Neil Gaiman blogged about this a few years ago.

Gnostic Knight · Feb 17, 2011

johnnysannie said:
Mention the song; scrap the lyrics. It's what I did in my novel due out in April and that worked just fine with the publisher.

But isn't the name of songs also copyrighted? I thought you could only say the name of a band, and not the title of a song or album.

Example, I could say, "he played that popular Depeche Mode love song about enjoying quite together," but I would get sued if I said, "he played Enjoy the Silence"

Deleted member 42 · Feb 17, 2011

Gnostic Knight said:
But isn't the name of songs also copyrighted? I thought you could only say the name of a band, and not the title of a song or album.

Example, I could say, "he played that popular Depeche Mode love song about enjoying quite together," but I would get sued if I said, "he played Enjoy the Silence"

You can't copyright a title.

Becca C. · Feb 17, 2011

Medievalist said:
You can't copyright a title.

Exactly. Otherwise you could sue anybody that jotted the title down somewhere; that's silly. You can't copyright something that doesn't take up a certain amount of space. Titles are considered too small.

Jamesaritchie · Feb 17, 2011

IceCreamEmpress said:
Using song lyrics is not necessarily a dealbreaker with agents, though some agents might see it as a sign of not knowing much about copyright and publishing.

As for who pays for permissions, maybe Stephen King doesn't, but other best-selling authors have to pay out of their own pockets. Neil Gaiman blogged about this a few years ago.

Agents have nothing at all to do with whether song lyrics are a deal breaker, and often have no clue about the law concerning them. Lyrics are a deal breaker with most publishers.

Neil Gaiman is another Stephen King, and I don't think his advice has anything to do with what bestselling writers do or don't do, or even with what publishers want or don't want. He's just telling the person asking a question how that person can get permission to use song lyrics.

I don't know any published writers who went out and got permission, or who paid for it themselves. Publishers usually do this.

But publishers flat out hate song lyrics in manuscripts from new writers. They can cost thousands of dollars, sometimes have to be purchased several times, and are often denied completely. This screws up everything.

There simply is no good reason for a new writer to put song lyrics in a manuscript. At best, the editor is going to simply cross them out. At worst, they can cause a rejection.

IceCreamEmpress · Feb 17, 2011

Jamesaritchie said:
I don't know any published writers who went out and got permission, or who paid for it themselves.

James, I think you missed one point Gaiman was making in the blog:

In my experience it's usually about $150 per quote. (On the other hand, the people who control the song "Under The Boardwalk" said this week that seven words would cost $800 and it wasn't negotiable, and I thought for a moment, and changed "Under the boardwalk..." he sang. "We'll be making love."
to
He sang. In his song he told them all exactly what he planned to do under the boardwalk, and it mostly involved making love.
which I liked better, and didn't cost anything.)

And by "didn't cost anything" he meant "didn't cost me anything," not "didn't cost my publishers anything."

If your publishers don't make you pay for permissions, you're in clover, because it is the norm. I have paid for my own permissions since the 1990s, and so have the best-selling authors I know, so that's not just my own obscurity or WFH-dom that's driving that.

Yes, someone at the publisher (at least for a Big Six imprint or for a university publisher) does the permissions legwork, but the publisher puts the fee on your tab.

Deleted member 42 · Feb 17, 2011

I should note that you can absolutely, dicker regarding licensing. And the publisher/publication makes a huge difference in the fee structures.

Jamesaritchie · Feb 17, 2011

Medievalist said:
I should note that you can absolutely, dicker regarding licensing. And the publisher/publication makes a huge difference in the fee structures.

Yes, and so does why and where the publisher wants to use it. Try dickering when the book is made into a movie. It's a whole other ballgame, and fees tend to go right through the ceiling. This is one reason publishers tend not to like such material in a book. If the book depends on it, so will the movie, and pretty much no one sells rights to anything on the cheap when you reach Hollywood.

And it's not so much that publishers don't make the writer pay for such things, it's that the money never, at least in my experience, comes straight out of the writers pocket. At worst, it's deducted somewhere along the line, and usually in a way that the writer never even notices.

But whenever and wherever rights come in, an attorney had better be attached at the hip. Publishers have attorneys who handle such matters, and who know what needs to go into the agreement. Darned few writers have a clue, and even if they hire an attorney, this adds considerable expense.

Anne Lyle · Feb 17, 2011

Jamesaritchie said:
It's much more complicated than this. There's no black and white to it. Permission comes in degrees, and it comes for specific uses, places, and times. "I need permission to use such and such in a novel" doesn't cover a fourth of what you really need.

I stand corrected. TBH it's not something I've looked into in detail, since the only song lyrics I quote in my book are four hundred years old or more, and some are anonymous.

I shall have to be careful to make my own translations of non-English lyrics, however...

Susan Coffin · Feb 17, 2011

Jamesaritchie said:
Do not quote song lyrics without permission. This is a deal breaker. It's often a deal breaker even if you do have permission. Stephen King can do this, new writers can't. Permission doesn't work the way many believe, and it often must be gained again, and paid for again, each time a new version of a novel is released, or when the novel goes from hardcover to paperback, or the other way around, or when a movie deal is made, etc. Publishers do not like this. And permission can cost many thousands of dollars. But even if it's free, it can still lead to problems.

Just don't do it. When you show a publisher you can make some serious sales with your novels, things will change. Until then, simply do not use song lyrics. Or poems, or anything else still under copyright.

Can you quote song lyrics of hymns that are in the public domain. I'm thinking of Amazing Grace or other popular hymns.

Anne Lyle · Feb 17, 2011

Susan Littlefield said:
Can you quote song lyrics of hymns that are in the public domain. I'm thinking of Amazing Grace or other popular hymns.

You need to check the date carefully - some hymns and folk songs aren't as old as you think. However I know Amazing Grace is late 18th century, since I watched the film of the same title only a couple of weeks ago (and checked the historical facts afterwards!), so that should be OK.

Is a MS containing licensed content a deal breaker?

Gnostic Knight

Anne Lyle

Fantastic historian

Cyia

Rewriting My Destiny

veinglory

volitare nequeo

Jamesaritchie

amyashley

Stunt-Writer

Sakura-chan

Old Hack

Such a nasty woman

Becca C.

tko

just thanks fore everything

Anne Lyle

Fantastic historian

Deleted member 42

johnnysannie

Jamesaritchie

IceCreamEmpress

Hapless Virago

Gnostic Knight

Deleted member 42

Becca C.

Jamesaritchie

IceCreamEmpress

Hapless Virago

Deleted member 42

Jamesaritchie

Anne Lyle

Fantastic historian

Susan Coffin

Tell it like it Is

Anne Lyle

Fantastic historian