How much is "fair use"?

I found this: http://www.writing-world.com/rights/fair.shtml

"Amount quoted or adapted. As a soft rule of thumb, a fiction writer can quote about 300 words of prose or two lines of poetry (not including the title of the poem) in his or her story. That is a total for the entire story--breaking up a 1500-word quotation into 150-word headings at the beginning of each chapter will not help. Failure to adhere to this will also result in grumbling and rejection or a rewrite."

There is NO 'how much.'

There is NO word limit.

The U.S. Copyright page is very clear about this. There is no acceptable portion or percentage or number of words you can use without permission.

That site Shadow Ferret posted from is talking out its ass, frankly.

You need permission, Aruna.

Also, fair use generally applies to the way you're using the words (in an educational setting, or a news piece, for example).

My apologies. I found this on wiki under the category: Common Misunderstandings --

"It's okay to quote up to 300 words. The 300-word limit is reported to be an unofficial agreement, now long obsolete, among permissions editors in the New York publishing houses: "I'll let you copy 300 words from our books if you let us copy 300 words from yours." It runs counter to the substantiality standard. As explained above, the substantiality of the copying is more important than the actual amount. For instance, copying a complete short poem is more substantial than copying a random paragraph of a novel; copying an 8.5×11-inch photo is more substantial than copying a square foot of an 8×10-foot painting. In 1985, the US Supreme Court held that a news article's quotation of approximately 300 words from former President Gerald Ford's 200,000 word memoir was sufficient to constitute an infringement of the exclusive publication right in the work."

Fair use also depend on how you use material. There is no provision for using someone else's copyrighted work in your own fiction.

No matter what you hear,"fair use" is not a grant of permission to use a quantity of someone else's copyrighted material. "Fair use" is a defense for when that person sues you for copyright infringement. There is no way of knowing in advance if you are going to be able to successfully defend your use of someone else's copyrighted material on that basis. The threshold for asserting the defense, however, is that you are using the copyrighted material in a work of criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship and/or research. [Section 107 of the US Copyright Act]

This post is not intended as legal advice to any person.

All the good answers have been given, so I'll be the smarty pants: How long is a piece of string?

Cyia said:

All the good answers have been given, so I'll be the smarty pants: How long is a piece of string?

Click to expand...

When I buy string, there's always something on the label that tells me how long it is. If I didn't know how long it was, how would I know how much to pay for it?