Quotations

Berne Convention revisions, and the evolution of its limitations and exceptions to copyright, includes a discussion of the quotation right issues addressed also by Ricketson.

WIPO Studies and Reports

  • The sections of SCCR9/7, the April 5, 2003 study on copyright limitations and exceptions by Sam Ricketson, dealing with quotations. (PDF)
  • Excerpts from BIRIPI DA/22/2, General Report of the Swedish BIRIPI Study Group Established in 1964.

UK

Poland

  • Tomasz Rychlicki‘s Polish IT and IP Law News: Archive for: quotation right
  • Tomasz Rychlicki and Adam Zieli?ski, Is Sampling Always Copyright Infringement? WIPO Magazine. November 2009. Polish IP lawyers Tomasz Rychlicki and Adam Zieli?ski present a case for the recognition of musical works that use sampling to make new derivative works. From the article:

    Using quotations
    Article 29, Paragraph 1 of the Polish Law on Authors’ Rights provides for the possibility that authors and creators may quote other works: “it shall be permissible to reproduce in the form of quotations, in works that constitute an integral whole, fragments of disclosed works or the entire contents of short works to the extent justified by explanation, critical analysis or teaching or by the characteristics of the kind of creativity concerned.” By extrapolation, new works containing samples as part of the creative work of an artist – but that are not simply mixes and remixes of other works – could be recognized as cases of lawful quotation.

    In other words, a work created in such a way could be recognized as an independent work incorporating quotations. An example of a musical quotation from the “pre-sampling” era would be a musical variation – defined as a work “referring to a subject, motif or another work” and the result of “a creative processing of that work.” In which case, creative sampling can be recognized as an activity justified by the type of works involved and, by the same token, fulfilling the Article 29 requirement. This signifies that, to avoid a charge of plagiarism, the author or original artist and source of the work must be mentioned – but not necessarily in the title – without the need to seek permission, the quotation right being a statutory license.

USA

This from a U.S. Copyright Office page on fair use:

The 1961 Report of the Register of Copyrights on the General Revision of the U.S. Copyright Law cites examples of activities that courts have regarded as fair use: “quotation of excerpts in a review or criticism for purposes of illustration or comment; quotation of short passages in a scholarly or technical work, for illustration or clarification of the author’s observations; use in a parody of some of the content of the work parodied; summary of an address or article, with brief quotations, in a news report; reproduction by a library of a portion of a work to replace part of a damaged copy; reproduction by a teacher or student of a small part of a work to illustrate a lesson; reproduction of a work in legislative or judicial proceedings or reports; incidental and fortuitous reproduction, in a newsreel or broadcast, of a work located in the scene of an event being reported.”