: Re: Is permission required for quoting the Bible or nursery rhymes? I have characters in my novels that quote the Bible and a couple lines of old nursery rhymes. Do I need to obtain permission

@Annie587

Vote Up Vote Down

There are three issues here:

Copyright is for a finite amount of time, basically life of the author plus 70 years, or if the copyright is owned by an organization rather than a person, or if the author is anonymous, for 95 years from date of publication.
A translation has a separate copyright from the original work, with the clock starting from when the translation was published, not the original work.
Under the "fair use doctrine", you can quote short excerpts from copyrighted works without getting permission.

So if you want to quote the original Hebrew text of Genesis, the copyright on that ran out about 1300 years ago. That's no problem.

If you want to quote the King James Version, that was published in 1611, so the copyright on that ran out 400 years ago. Again, no problem.

More recent translations still have copyright protection. For example the New International Version was published in 1978, so the copyright on that is good until 2073. New King James (Jimmy 2) was published in 1982. Etc.

Many Bible publishers have policies about what they consider "fair use" that they will not challenge. If you stay within these limits, you should be 100% safe. For example, in the front of my Hohlman Bible it says that you can copy "up to and inclusive of 250 verses ... provided that the verses quoted do not account for more than 20 percent of the work in which they are quoted, and provided that a complete book of the Bible is not quoted". There are similar statements in the front of the New International and the New King James, probably many other translations.

Shakespeare died in 1616, so likewise, copyright on anything he wrote is long expired.

For your nursery rhymes, check the publican date. If it's before 1923, the copyright has expired. Books written before 1970-something had shorter copyrights, so if you're looking at something on the borderline, you need to get into the details of the rules. Anything after 1970 is still under copyright unless the author has explicitly released it to public domain, or a few other special cases.

Under "fair use", you can quote a line or two from a poem or a song even if it is still protected by copyright. But don't quote the whole thing, or a substantial portion of it.

(0)

Login to post a comment!