Copyright Permissions and Fair Use

Almost every author we work with runs into this question at some point. You want to open a chapter with a quote. You found the perfect image for a card deck. You want to build a journal around scripture, or include song lyrics that mean something to your reader. The question is always the same: can you use it, or do you need to ask first?

This guide covers what is protected, what is not, how fair use actually works, and the specific licensing traps that catch people creating products for sale rather than writing for the page. It is written for the situations we see most often in production.

Start with three questions

Most permission questions resolve by working through these in order.

1. Is the work still protected by copyright? If it is in the public domain, you can use it freely and you do not need permission from anyone.
2. Are you using enough of it to matter? Copyright protects specific expression, not ideas, facts, or titles. Referencing a work is not the same as reproducing it.
3. Does fair use cover what you are doing? This is the hardest of the three, because fair use is a judgment call rather than a rule with a bright line.

If you get a clear yes at step one, you can stop. Most of the difficulty in this area comes from people jumping straight to step three.

What copyright protects, and what it does not

Copyright protects original expression fixed in a tangible form. It does not protect the underlying idea, and that distinction does more work than most people expect.

Not protected by copyright: facts and data, ideas and concepts, methods and systems, titles of books, songs, and movies, short phrases and slogans, and lists of ingredients in a recipe. You are free to write your own book about the same subject as someone else's book. You are free to reference a title. You are free to state a fact you learned somewhere else.

Protected: the particular words someone chose, the particular way they organized their material, illustrations, photographs, song lyrics, poems, and the descriptive writing around a recipe even though the ingredient list itself is not.

Two things frequently mistaken for copyright issues are not copyright issues at all. A brand name or logo is a trademark question. A real person's name or face used on a product is a right of publicity question. Both are covered further down, because both come up constantly in card decks and merchandise.

How fair use actually works

Fair use is not a category of permitted uses. It is a defense that a court weighs across four factors, and no single factor decides the outcome on its own.

• 1. The purpose and character of your useCommentary, criticism, scholarship, news reporting, and parody weigh in your favor. Commercial use weighs against you, though it does not rule fair use out. The strongest question is whether you added something new: a new meaning, a new message, a new purpose, rather than simply repackaging the original.
• 2. The nature of the original workUsing factual or reference material weighs in your favor. Using highly creative work such as poetry, fiction, song lyrics, or art weighs against you.
• 3. How much you used, and how central it wasLess is better, but this is measured against the whole. Four lines of a book is trivial. Four lines of a short poem may be most of it. Taking the heart of a work counts against you even when the quantity is small.
• 4. The effect on the market for the originalThis factor carries a great deal of weight. If your product substitutes for the original, or undercuts an existing licensing market the owner relies on, fair use becomes very hard to argue.

Two beliefs that are simply not true

There is no safe word count. No rule permits 250 words, or 10 percent, or one line of a song. Those figures circulate widely and none of them appear anywhere in the law. Some publishers adopt internal guidelines, but an internal guideline is not a legal safe harbor.

Attribution is not permission. Crediting the source is good practice and you should always do it. It does not make an infringing use lawful, and it does not convert a use that needed permission into one that did not.

Quick reference

The general pattern of what tends to require permission and what tends not to. Treat this as a starting point rather than an answer.

The public domain, and why the date keeps moving

Works in the public domain belong to everyone. No permission, no fee, no attribution required, although attribution remains good practice.

In the United States, published works enter the public domain 95 years after publication, and the boundary advances every January 1. It is not a fixed year. If you are reading a guide anywhere that names a permanent cutoff, that guide is out of date, because the boundary was frozen for two decades and started moving again in 2019.

Two situations put older works into the public domain earlier than the 95 year rule suggests, and both are common enough to be worth checking. Many works published in the United States between 1929 and 1963 lost protection because the copyright was never renewed. Many works published before 1978 without a proper copyright notice also lost protection. Neither is something to assume, but both are worth researching when a specific older work matters to your project.

One caution on music. A song has two separate copyrights: the composition, meaning the words and melody, and the sound recording. They expire on different schedules. A composition being in the public domain does not entitle you to use a particular recording of it.

Quoting from the Bible

Scripture is one of the most frequent questions we get, particularly for journals, planners, and card decks. The answer depends entirely on the translation, because a translation is itself a copyrightable work.

Translations old enough to be in the public domain

• King James Version
• American Standard Version
• Douay-Rheims
• Young's Literal Translation
• Darby Translation
• The 1917 Jewish Publication Society translation

Translations under copyright

Modern translations are protected, and each publisher sets its own limits on how much you may quote without asking. Those limits vary widely, so check the specific translation you plan to use rather than assuming one publisher's terms apply to another.

Among the translations people most often assume are free but are not: the Revised Standard Version, first published in 1946 and 1952, the New Revised Standard Version, the New Jewish Publication Society Tanakh, and the Jerusalem Bible. Permission terms for other current translations are published here:

• New International Version: Bible Gateway permissions
• English Standard Version: Crossway permissions
• Good News Translation: Bible Society copyright and permissions
• New King James Version, New Century Version, International Children's Bible, Expanded Bible, and The Voice: HarperCollins Christian Publishing permissions

Two practical notes. Publisher limits are usually stated as a maximum number of verses, and they typically also prohibit using so many verses that they make up a complete book of the Bible or the majority of your own product. A scripture card deck can reach that second limit long before it reaches the verse count. And if you sell internationally, be aware that the King James Version is in the public domain in the United States but remains under Crown copyright in the United Kingdom.

Song lyrics and poetry deserve their own warning

These are the two categories where authors get into trouble most often, and where the amount you can safely use is smallest.

Music publishers actively monitor and enforce, permission fees are frequently high, and the process can take months. Because a song is short, even one line can represent a meaningful share of the whole work, which weighs against fair use under the third factor. The same logic applies to poems, and applies more sharply the shorter the poem is.

The practical advice we give: if a lyric or a poem is central enough to your product that losing it would hurt, start the permission process early and budget for it. If it is decorative, write your own line instead. Original words also make the product more yours.

Images, stock art, and fonts

This section matters more for the products we print than anything else on this page, because the rules for a physical product sold at retail are different from the rules for a blog post, and the license you already bought may not cover what you are about to do.

Stock image licenses often exclude products for resale

A standard stock license commonly permits use in marketing, on a website, or inside a book, while restricting or excluding use on products where the image is the main thing being sold. Coloring books, card decks, journal covers, stickers, and posters frequently fall into that restricted category and require an extended or enhanced license. Many standard licenses also cap the total number of copies you may print. Read the license for print run limits and for language about merchandise, products for resale, or print on demand before you commit to a design.

Creative Commons is not the same as free

Check which Creative Commons license applies. A NonCommercial license prohibits selling the product entirely. A ShareAlike license requires you to release your derivative work under the same terms, which for a card deck or planner can mean giving away rights to your own creation. Attribution requirements are also binding conditions, not suggestions.

Fonts are licensed software

A font downloaded for free is very often licensed for personal use only, and using it on a product you sell breaches that license. Commercial licenses are usually inexpensive, but they need to be bought before the print run rather than after. If you are unsure which fonts a designer used, ask, and ask for the license documentation.

Public domain artwork is safest

Art old enough to be in the public domain is genuinely free to use, which makes it well suited to coloring books and card decks. Museum collections and library digital archives are good sources, and many publish clear rights statements.

Art you commissioned: who actually owns it

This is the single most common expensive surprise we see, and it has nothing to do with quoting anyone.

When you hire an illustrator, designer, or photographer as an independent contractor, paying the invoice does not by itself transfer the copyright. In the United States, work created by a contractor generally belongs to the contractor unless there is a signed written agreement transferring or assigning the rights to you. The phrase work for hire has a specific legal meaning that does not automatically apply just because you paid for the work.

What this means in practice: without a written assignment, you may hold a limited license to use the art rather than ownership of it. That can restrict reprinting, adapting the design for a second product, licensing it onward, or selling the business later.

Get the rights transfer in writing before work begins, name the products and formats the art will be used in, and keep the signed document with your project files. If art has already been delivered without one, it is usually straightforward to paper it afterward, and far easier to do while the relationship is good.

Content generated by artificial intelligence

Two separate issues arise when AI tools contribute to a product, and they pull in different directions.

The first is what you own. United States copyright protection requires human authorship, and material generated by an AI system without meaningful human authorship is not protected. A work that combines your own writing or design with AI generated elements can still be registered, but the AI generated portions have to be disclaimed, and the protection covers only your human contribution. For a coloring book or card deck built largely on generated art, that can mean very little of the product is protectable, and nothing stops a competitor from copying it.

The second is what you might be exposed to. Different tools make different commitments about the material they were trained on and about indemnifying commercial users. Check the terms of the specific tool, and keep records of what was generated and how.

This is an area where both the law and the tools are still moving. If a product depends on AI generated content, it is worth current legal advice rather than guidance written a year ago.

Names, faces, and brands

Copyright is not the only right that applies to a product, and clearing the copyright does not clear the rest.

Right of publicity. Using a real person's name, image, voice, or likeness to sell a product is governed separately from copyright, mostly by state law, and it varies considerably from state to state. Several states extend the right after death. A deck of cards named for a well known figure, or a cover featuring a recognizable face, raises this issue even if every quote inside is properly licensed.

Trademark. Brand names and logos are trademarks. Referring to a brand accurately is generally fine. Putting a brand's name or logo on a product you sell, or naming your product in a way that suggests endorsement or affiliation, is not.

Privacy and releases. If your book includes photographs of identifiable people, particularly children, you want signed model releases on file. This applies to your own photographs as much as to licensed ones.

How to ask for permission

Requesting permission is more routine than most people expect, and rights holders are used to receiving these messages.

Start with the copyright page of the work, which usually names the rights holder. For books, contact the publisher's permissions or subsidiary rights department. For songs, the publisher rather than the artist controls the lyrics, and performing rights organization databases will identify it. For images, contact the photographer, the agency, or the museum.

Include in your request exactly what you want to use and how much, the title and description of your product, the format and approximate print quantity, the territory and languages, whether the product is for sale, and your timeline. Vague requests get slow answers.

Expect the process to take weeks and sometimes months, expect a fee, and get the permission in writing before you go to print. Start early enough that a refusal does not derail the project, and keep the correspondence with your files.

Protecting your own work

Your copyright exists automatically the moment you fix your work in tangible form. Registration is optional, but it changes what you can do if someone copies you.

In the United States, you must register before you can file an infringement suit. Registering before an infringement begins, or within three months of first publication, also preserves your ability to seek statutory damages and attorney fees rather than only proving actual losses. That distinction is what makes enforcement affordable in practice.

Registration is handled through the United States Copyright Office at copyright.gov. If you would like us to handle copyright registration or a Library of Congress Control Number on your behalf, the request forms are in your Vervante author account.