Avoiding Copyright Laws for my Blog

[VulcanMindBlown]

Hey, I have a Science Fiction blog that I right commentary, reviews, and information on and I don't want to get in trouble for quoting things.

I do plan on making summaries of chapters in books to give a good summary of what would happen. Would that violate copy right? I don't want to.

 

[Idran]

Summaries don't violate copyright, or else TWoP would have been shut down within a few months for the pure level of snark it put out.

They fall under commentary, so you're fine. Just don't copy big chunks of actual text; even quoting passages should be fine so long as they're properly cited. If you quote passages, the rule of thumb is don't reproduce more than 10% of the original material.

 

[Greg Cox]

In general, criticism is fair use, as long as you don't quote a significant percentage of the work being reviewed. For example: quoting a couple of paragraphs from a novel to illustrate a point is fine. Copying an entire chapter would be pushing it.

"Summarizing" an entire chapter is different than just copying it, but, ideally, there ought to be more commentary than summarizing.

When I wrote an unauthorized XENA guide several years ago, I kept my synopses of the episodes down to one paragraph apiece. The rest of the entries were all reviews and commentary and comparisons to actual history and mythology, etc. I stayed away from detailed summaries of the plots.

Hope this helps.

 

[STR]

Going along with the others, (and prefacing the IANAL, though I've taken classes on civil/business law and deal with some copyright issues as someone who writes software) the crux of the issue is whether or not you've "transformed" the cited copywritten work. Summarizing can be transformational by itself (I'd agree with the abovementioned 10% rule). If you're trying to provide commentary or criticism, you're even better protected, as the cornerstone of fair use is academic/critical review. So long as the article is more about "what you think about X" rather than "X" itself, you're on pretty good ground.

That's about as good as you can get. Fair use cases are decided on a case-by-case basis. Precedent doesn't necessarily help you as it's considered very narrowly. Though, again, IANAL so I might not be explaining /interpreting that correctly. Though I'm fairly certain I'm in the ballpark here. Which might not be good enough.

TL;DR: I think you're fine, but if you want to be certain consult a lawyer.