What we quote, and why we may

This site is made out of other people’s words. Nearly every sheet is a reading of something somebody else wrote, and for the first ten sheets everything being read was in the public domain — Dickinson, Rossetti, Woolf, Shakespeare, Sappho — so the question of whether we were allowed never once came up. It comes up now. This page is the position we take when the work is still in copyright: what we quote, how much of it, why we think we may, and what to do if you hold the rights and disagree.

Last updated 11 September 2026. Like the privacy page, this one binds us, so any change to it gets an entry in the accession register — including a change that narrows what we claim.

Why there is a policy and not a habit Link to this section

There are two ways to get this wrong. The first is obvious: quote carelessly, take more than the argument needs, and treat somebody’s work as raw material. The second is to refuse to quote at all, and that is the one that nearly happened here, so it is the one worth writing down.

A blanket rule against quoting work still in copyright does not produce silence. It produces paraphrase. And a paraphrase with the attribution still attached is the exact failure this site is organised against. The ledger says so in its opening lines: the risk here is not an invented source, it is a tightened one — a definition trimmed to fit, an object quietly generalised, the name left on. If we changed the words, they are ours. Declining to quote and describing instead is that same failure wearing a cautious hat.

The finding aid already refuses to crop a quotation for this reason: a snippet machine pointed at eighty-two mounted quotations manufactures eighty-two tightened sources, one per result. Refusing to quote at all is the same defect with the volume turned up.

Fair use is also a right, and a right nobody exercises gets narrower. The communities that had this argument first — documentary filmmakers, librarians, archivists — answered it by writing down what they actually do and why, rather than clearing everything on reflex. That is the code of best practices model set out by Patricia Aufderheide and Peter Jaszi at the Center for Media & Social Impact, and courts have cited such codes. This page is one, for a very small house.

The rule Link to this section

Quote what you analyse, and analyse what you quote.

Every quotation from work still in copyright has to be the thing under discussion on the page it appears on. No decorative epigraphs, no pull quote chosen because it is beautiful, nothing that could be deleted without changing the argument. If a sheet is not saying something about those particular words, they do not go on it.

That is an editorial rule before it is a legal one — it is most of what makes a reading a reading — and it happens to be the strongest posture available under the first fair-use factor, which asks what the new use is actually for. Three things follow from it:

• Never the whole of a short work. A poem, a song, an aphorism: the whole thing is quotable when the whole thing is what we are reading and the work is out of copyright. When it is not, we take the part we are arguing with.
• Mark every cut. Ellipses, always, so a reader can see exactly where the scissors went. An unmarked cut is a tightened source, which is the failure above under another name.
• Name the maker, not the carrier. The writer of the song, not only whoever you heard sing it. The translator as well as the author. The editor who chose the order, where the order is the point.

There is no number Link to this section

The most repeated claim about quotation is that there is a safe amount. Two lines. Four lines. Eight bars. Ten per cent. Two hundred and fifty words. None of it is in the law. Section 107 of the United States copyright statute sets out four factors to be weighed together and names no threshold at all, and no case has supplied one.

The numbers come from publishers’ permissions departments and from author contracts that push clearance downstream. They are a way of allocating risk between a publisher and a writer, and they are useful to the publisher. They are not a statement of what anybody is permitted to do, and repeating them as though they were has quietly persuaded a great many writers that they need permission they do not need.

We say this out loud because the folklore does real damage, and because a reader is entitled to know that when this site takes four lines of something it is not because four is the allowance. There is no allowance. There is a judgement, and it is made below.

How the four factors actually fall here Link to this section

Weighed honestly, which means naming the one that runs against us.

Purpose and character of the use. The statute’s opening words name criticism, comment, teaching, scholarship and research, and that is the entirety of what this site does. Nothing here is sold, nothing carries advertising, and there is no commercial arrangement of any kind. Warhol v. Goldsmith (2023) sharpened the question usefully: does the new use share the original’s purpose and stand in for it? A reading of a poem does not do the job the poem does. Nobody has ever come away from a sheet here with their need for the poem met.

Nature of the copied work. This is the factor that runs against us, and we are not going to pretend otherwise. Poems, songs and letters are creative rather than factual, and creative work sits at the centre of what copyright protects. The one thing in our favour is that everything we quote has been published; quoting unpublished work is a harder question, and Harper & Row (1985) is the reason.

Amount and substantiality. Proportional and qualitative at once, and the two can disagree. Four lines out of a long poem is small. The same four lines out of a two-hundred-word song is not. And Harper & Row turned on three hundred words out of two hundred thousand, because those three hundred were the heart of the book — so the test is not only how much but which part. A chorus is a heart by construction.

Effect on the market. A reading is not a substitute for the thing read, and every sheet here links out to where the work can be bought, borrowed, or heard. If this site has any market effect at all it is the one the sheets are trying for: somebody goes and gets the book.

Songs are the hard case Link to this section

Not because lyrics are a special category in law — they are not — but because songs are short. Everything in the amount factor above bites harder when the whole work is two hundred words, and the part everybody remembers is the part it would be most tempting to take.

So, for a song:

• A line or two, and a whole verse only when the verse is the thing being read.
• Never the chorus on its own. A hook lifted out and admired is the heart of the work taken for the reason it is the heart.
• The songwriter named, always, and the performer named separately when they are not the same person. On this site that is not a technicality: which of them a listener credits is frequently the thing a sheet is about.
• A link to a copy the rightsholder is paid for, and the recording we actually listened to named with its release and year — lyric aggregators are unreliable about wording and often unlicensed, and a wrong lyric is a wrong quotation.

Refusing to quote is an access failure Link to this section

This is the argument that settles it, and it is the one a copyright discussion usually never reaches.

Go and listen to the recording is an audio-only requirement. A page whose argument can only be followed by hearing something excludes Deaf and hard-of-hearing readers outright, and it excludes anybody without the subscription, the bandwidth, the quiet, or the ability to parse sung words reliably. WCAG asks for a text alternative to prerecorded audio-only content for exactly this reason.

And describing the song in our own words is not the alternative. That is us replacing the evidence with our summary of it — the paraphrase failure again, arriving from a third direction.

The quoted line is the accessible version. On a site published by a Disability foundation, that is not a trade we are willing to make in order to look careful.

What we can license, and what we cannot Link to this section

Our words and our drawings are licensed CC BY-SA 4.0. Quoted material is not ours to license, and is excluded — which is what the footer on every sheet is saying when it says that everyone else’s belongs to them, or to nobody.

That matters more here than it would on a site under a more restrictive licence, because share-alike invites reuse, commercial reuse included. Somebody adapting a sheet receives our commentary under CC BY-SA. They do not receive a licence to the poem inside it, and their reuse of that poem is their own question to answer, in their own jurisdiction, for their own purpose. We would rather say so plainly than leave a reuser to discover it.

Outside the United States Link to this section

Fair use is United States law, this site is published by a United States foundation, and half of the collaboration is not in the United States. The relevant exceptions elsewhere are differently built but point the same way, and the useful thing about them is what they ask for in return.

In the United Kingdom, fair dealing for the purpose of criticism or review requires sufficient acknowledgement and that the work has already been made available to the public. In the European Union, the quotation exception requires the source and the author’s name wherever that is practicable.

Every one of those conditions is something the attribution ledger already does, for reasons that had nothing to do with copyright. The strictest regime’s requirement and this house’s own editorial rule turn out to be the same requirement, which is worth noticing: we did not adopt a practice to satisfy a statute, and the statute is satisfied anyway.

If you hold the rights Link to this section

Then we would rather hear from you than not. The repository’s issues are the fastest route and are answered in public, which is where corrections to the sheets are raised too; either foundation site will also reach us.

If you think we have taken too much, or taken the wrong part, or got the wording or the credit wrong, say so and it will be looked at properly. Whichever way it goes, it gets an entry in the register — including if the answer is that we removed something we believed we were entitled to keep. A correction made quietly is a correction that only exists for us.

What we are not going to do is treat a letter and a judgement as the same thing, or take something down merely because taking things down is the easier of two defensible options. Fair use exists in order to be used, and a house that quotes as much as this one does owes it more than lip service.

Not legal advice, and not written by a lawyer. This page describes the judgement this site makes and the reasoning behind it. It is not a statement about what anybody else may do, and it is not a substitute for advice about your own use. If it is wrong about a fact — a case, a statute, a condition — that is a correction and it belongs in the register; say so and it will be.