[Elfwreck]

Originally Posted by Xenophon

@elfwreck: No, I do not have a specific ruling. There may be one (or several), but... I am not a lawyer so take what follows with the appropriate wheelbarrow-load of salt.

Well, damn.

I was hoping you had something with hard numbers, because I know you make a real effort to give accurate info. And 1000 words/50% whichever-is-less sounds good--but it also sounds like it's some University's standard, that someone thought was based on specific legal rulings, rather than what that Uni decided was likely to not get them sued.

Please note, by the way, that the rule-of-thumb applies to written works only so your movie or song example wouldn't fit. I seem to recall that song lyrics and poetry may have different rules (but I can't remember whether that's because of differences in their nature or because their rule of thumb came from a different court case).

Almost certainly, there is no legal difference. Copyright law doesn't recognize a difference between a 500-word short story and a 500-word song, nor between a 50k word novel and a 50k note musical composition. (Disclaimer: also not a lawyer.) There've been rulings that only apply to one medium (like music sampling), but I don't think any judge has ever said "X% copying is always within fair use guidelines."

Nation magazine was successfully sued for quoting 300 words out of a book. 85 seconds of music from a two-hour movie has been ruled infringing.

The issue of "college students & professors, some of whom are being told that they cannot use any direct quotes at all in their papers, to avoid lawsuits" is different, however. The rule-of-thumb I gave addresses the question "am I likely to prevail in court if someone were to sue me over this quotation?" If the question that concerns you is "Am I likely to be sued over using this quotation?", all I can do is to observe that any fool can bring suit for any d*mn thing they like.

Ah, but if there were a specific legal precedent for "1000 words quoted from book is OK," the schools most likely wouldn't have a policy of "no quoting is allowed." Anyone can sue, but if an initial defense is likely to get it thrown out of court, the school is not likely to forbid the quoting.

They don't, after all, forbid the quoting of titles, even though a fanatic copyright owner could claim that's illegal copyright infringement. (Claim. Not succeed.)

I would expect that any sane college or university has an explicit written policy on the subject, and will defend faculty, staff, or students who have obeyed that policy but are nevertheless sued for copyright violations. That seems like basic academic freedoms to me. And it's certainly what my University does.

Xenophon

The policy at this university, maybe more than one (am remembering Livejournal discussions from a couple of years ago), was "absolutely no direct quotes whatsoever; everything must be paraphrased." Which was incredibly difficult on the media-arts film-and-television students. I'm told that discussing the social impact of Star Trek without being able to say "make it so" or "beam me up, scotty" was troublesome.