This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
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Today's listener has a legal question that I can actually answer with some confidence. I usually stay away from those questions because I'm not a lawyer, I'm not qualified, et cetera, but I know a lot about this one. When writing a book, how do I get permission to use another author's work? Now, this question can actually apply to a lot more than just books. It's fundamentally a question about copyright and what is permissible in terms of quoting or referencing or otherwise using someone else's intellectual property.
So it could be for your blog, it could be for your social media, or you're allowed to take a picture of somebody's, you know, like a quote in somebody's book and upload it. It could be for YouTube, a podcast, some other form of distribution, whatever it is, how can you use somebody else's work without getting into trouble? So let's talk about that with a few examples in today's episode. [Music]
Hi Chris, it's Lisa from Sydney, Australia. I'm a big fan and have been listening to the show for a few years now.
I've had some success with my first hide hustle and I'm now looking to launch my second, which involves books and reading. So something I'm passionate about. I'm struggling to find out how I get permission from an author to use their work. I've spent hours online trying to find the answer and got nowhere. My question is, should I just use their work anyway and start now?
Thanks, and I look forward to your advice. Hey Lisa, thank you so much for listening from my favorite city in the world, Sydney, Australia. It's been a long time since I've been there now. Haven't done much traveling at all recently. So hopefully at some point I can return.
Now let's talk about your question. Without knowing more specifics, because I feel like it could be a lot of different things. Don't know exactly what you're doing in terms of your book or your project, et cetera. But without knowing more specifics, I think this question relates to what is known as fair use or fair dealing. Sometimes called the fair use doctrine or fair dealing.
And the short version here is if you are in a situation that Lisa's in, or you really want to understand like, is it okay for me to do this or not? You really should Google those terms, fair use or fair dealing. There's a lot of information out there and you want to read up on the laws and examples for your country or region. Because it is different depending on where you are. However, a couple of general principles.
The fair use doctrine applies primarily in the United States. And the general principle here is like as the name implies, there is a standard of what's considered acceptable or fair in using someone else's copyrighted work. And this applies not only to books, but also to music. Things like a clip of a movie and a YouTube video and more. So it's meant to be based on common sense, which not all parts of the law are of course.
But in this case, it covers things like critique or review. For example, if you look on YouTube, this is always a good place to check this kind of stuff. If you look on YouTube, there's a lot of movie reviews or people commenting on movies. There's a guy I like to watch who does accent training or accent critiques. And he'll post clips from a lot of different movies and kind of comment on how well the actor did or what they could do better and so on.
So he's posting all this stuff, but he's just posting short little clips, like a short little clip and then he is commenting. So he is providing critique or review and that is acceptable. Parody or satire is also acceptable as long as it's clear that it's parody or satire. This is why on Twitter, whenever there's a popular parody account, it always says parody account. They basically have to do that.
But as long as they do, it's usually considered okay. In terms of books, like a similar standard, short quotes or a short excerpt is generally gonna be okay. Copying a book or copying a chapter wholesale or just putting large portions of somebody else's text into your book or your blog or whatever is not okay. So as a specific example, like I'm working on a book right now and I was reading this novel, this trilogy, actually like a sci-fi trilogy called "The Three Body Problem." Really liked this book, by the way. Shout out to the guy who wrote that.
I don't know him, "Three Body Problem." And there's an example in that novel that I wanted to kind of pull in and put in this nonfiction book that I'm writing. And so I kind of just described it and I said, "There's this concept in this book, "the three body problem and here's what it's about." Basically, I think I included a short little quote with like a couple of sentences. It's really obvious that it's a quote from the book. I'm ascribing it to that author. That's an example of fair use.
I'm not gonna get in trouble for using that. My publisher will do a legal review, but I know they won't have a question about that. So in Australia or other Commonwealth zones or countries, the legal statute is called fair dealing, which is a bit more limited than fair use because fair dealing outlines very specifically which categories and examples are included, whereas fair use allows for future technologies and new interpretation of the doctrine. If you think about it, you realize, okay, fair use is actually better because the world is constantly changing. Like the YouTube example that I'm talking about, for example, YouTube didn't exist when the Copyright Act of 1976 was passed in the United States.
Another example, when VCRs first came out. Do you remember those by the way, like video cassette recorders? Maybe some people who are younger than me have heard of them. But when VCRs first came out, the entertainment industry fought pretty hard to prevent people from using them to record anything, even though I think they were called right video cassette recorders. The entertainment industry actively challenged that.
And the fair use doctrine, it was ruled that it's okay. It's legal to use a VCR to record television at home. And that ruling came out in 1984, basically an interpretation of the previous fair use doctrine. In Australia, this wasn't actually legal until parliament created an exemption in 2006. So it was technically illegal in Australia to use your VCR to record television, even though everybody did it anyway.
And by the time they created the exemption was just about the time that nobody was actually using a VCR. So all that to say, a short history lesson, it depends on what you're doing. If you're copying a chapter of someone's book into yours, you probably shouldn't do that. If you're merely referencing something, that's probably okay. But go read more about those two topics, fair use and fair dealing.
You should be able to see if you're okay or not. Of course, if you're still not sure, then you probably should consult with a real legal expert, which would not be me. All right, listeners, if you've got a question, come to sidehustleschool.com/questions. We'll be featuring them throughout the year, along with updates from other listeners as they launch and grow their projects. I'm so excited to be able to bring this program to you every single day.
It's coming back tomorrow, so I hope you're subscribed. My name is Chris Guillebeau. This is Side Hustle School. [Music]
From the Onward Project.
