USING SONG TITLES AND LYRICS IN YOUR FICTION

Copywriting Your Fiction Happens the Second You Put Pen to Paper and Create an Original Work

It’s easy to get caught up wanting to pull song lyrics into your writing. Your protagonist is driving in a truck headed west to meet up with her dying mother and (enter your favorite singer and song lyrics here) comes on the radio. Let’s call your protagonist Martha. Martha pulls over, breaks down, starts remembering everything about her growing up on the outskirts of Amarillo. The generations of Martha’s family who worked in cattle, in dairy, in corn. Martha’s lost everything. Her husband. Her uncles. Her father. Now she’s losing her mother, the only woman who’s given a damn about her in her whole life. Willie’s “In My Mother’s Eyes” just tears Martha up so the tears blind her. It’s a touching moment. But here’s the thing: You can’t use any of the lines in the song. The title? Sure. But the lyrics? Uh uh. Those suckers are fully copyrighted.

So, here are the basic rules of using song titles and lyrics in your fiction. Don’t take what you read here as written in stone; new rules may pop up, and there are likely nuances I won’t capture here. But the rules below are a good starting point that’ll likely keep you on the right path and point you in the right direction of where you should go if you want to be sure you’re following the copyright laws here in the U.S. of A.

You can use song titles in your fiction.

Want to drop the Rolling Stones’ “Sympathy for the Devil” in your novel about vampires? Go for it. Puck, the hero of your Cyberpunk novel, want to play Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit” at Aisle 5 in Atlanta’s Little 5 Points neighborhood? Do it. Song titles, like book titles, are too short to copyright. They’re too lacking in creative expression to copyright. You also can’t copyright slogans, short phrases, character names like Raskolnikov from Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, etc. But there’s an exception. You can use all these things if they’re old. Like, very old. Things that are in the public domain, meaning they’ve been published before January 1^st, 1931, are available for you to use in your writings.

Any musical compositions published in or before 1930 are in the public domain. For musical compositions created after January 1, 1978, copyright protection lasts for the life of the author plus another 70 years.

The Music Modernization Act, which is a federal law, give protections to sound recordings made before February 15, 1972 (but again, make sure you research this as it’s based on a sliding scale). Music and recordings that were published in or before 1925 are, as of now, in the public domain. And then recordings that came out between 1926 and 1946 hold protections for 100 years. Those made between 1947 and 1972 are protected until February 15, 2067.

Sheet music is free to use. The actual original audio recordings are not free to use. Unless, of course, you get or pay for the license to do so (although if you’re writing a novel, unless you’re doing some sort of mixed medium thing, you don’t have to worry about it).

When it comes to international use, music, for the most part, enters the public domain somewhere between fifty and a hundred years after the death of the creator. But again, make sure you’re researching each specific song, artist, and country’s rules to make sure you’re not putting yourself at legal risk. You’re a writer; it’s probably pretty safe to say you aren’t making millions putting pen to paper, so you want to do your due diligence before you get sued, not after.

The topic of copyrighting something has bothered me for my entire writing life, so I’d like to address it. When you write something or record something that is original, that work is automatically copyrighted. You don’t have to hide it away in a drawer and treat it as if it’s the holy grail. You don’t have to keep the title from other authors or creators; it’s your work, not theirs. That said, officially registering your work with the U.S. Copyright Office gives you a great advantage legally. If someone “steals” your work—your fiction, your lyrics, whatever, you’re then able to sue for copyright infringement, statutory damages, and so on. But again, copyright is automatic. There’s no need to get all riled up that someone’s going to steal your work if you don’t officially copyright it. And besides, it’s hard enough trying to get your novel published (unless you’re self-publishing). No one is looking to steal your work. Trust me.

If you want to read up more about current copyright laws, go to the U.S. Copyright website to do your own research on what you can and can’t do legally. Or, if you have the resources to do so, hire a copyright lawyer or someone who specializes in copyright law. It’s better to be safe than sorry, although I doubt (again, this is my own opinion and should not be taken as legal advice) anyone’s going to go after you financially, unless your work is a phenomenal success. Most likely you’ll just get a Cease and Desist letter. Click on the link to see Cornell Law School’s cease and desist letter page.

If you want to jump right into the process of copyrighting your novel, you can navigate directly to the United States Copyright Office Registration page.

One of the best resources available to you to figure out what you can and cannot use in your writing when it comes to what is or isn’t in the public domain is Duke Law’s Center for the Study of the Public Domain. Per their “About Us” page: “The public domain is the realm of material—ideas, images, sounds, discoveries, facts, texts—that is unprotected by intellectual property rights and free for all to use or build upon. Our economy, culture and technology depend on a delicate balance between that which is, and is not, protected by exclusive intellectual property rights. Both the incentives provided by intellectual property and the freedom provided by the public domain are crucial to the balance. But most contemporary attention has gone to the realm of the protected.”

If you're intersted in using song titles and lyrics in your fiction, here’s a list of novels whose titles come from the titles of songs:

1. Yesterday’s Papers. Author: Martin Edwards. Group: Rolling Stones.

2. Heart-Shaped Box. Author: Joe Hill. Group: Nirvana.

3. Creep. Author: I.J. Parker. Group: Radiohead. (also my favorite group!)

4. Night Moves. Author: Jonathan Kellerman. Musician: Bob Segar

5. Every Breath You Take. Author: Mary Higgins Clark. Group: The Police

6. Time After Time. Author: Lisa Grunwald. Musician: Cyndi Lauper (also my first concert!)

7. There There. Author: Tommy Orang. Group: Radiohead

8. Our House. Author: Louise Candlish. Group: Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young.

9. Norwegian Wood. Author: Haruki Marukami. Group: The Beatles.

10. Dear John. Author: Nicholas Sparks. Group: Taylor Swift.

11. John Dufresne’s novel, My Darling Boy, takes its title from Mark Knopfler’s “All that Matters.” So, in his case, the reverse is true: the novel takes its title from lyrics in Knopfler’s song.

Cully Perlman is author of a novel, The Losses. He can be reached at Cully@novelmasterclass.com 

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