Song lyrics in stories - legality?

I like to use lyrics of particular songs in my stories in order to create a mood. Can anyone tell me if there is a legal risk in doing this and posting the story here?

It's illegal to use copyrighted material. If you were publishing it in print, you would have to pay for the priviledge of using the lyrics. Literotica will permit you to include lyrics in the story, but only a couple of lines or so. No one has incurred any legal retribution for doing so in the 5 years the site has been online. The most you would get would be your story yanked should the site owners receive the first legal hurdle, a cease and desist order, which they would immediately comply with.

Titles are free.

A smart writer doesn't get hooked on the idea of lyrics creating a mood. 1) you can't do it legally and 2) you have a large, international, multi-generational, eclectic audience and not everyone will know the music that goes with the song and they won't know what mood they're supposed to get from it.

Create mood with narrative for more universal results.

KillerMuffin said:

A smart writer doesn't get hooked on the idea of lyrics creating a mood. 1) you can't do it legally and 2) you have a large, international, multi-generational, eclectic audience and not everyone will know the music that goes with the song and they won't know what mood they're supposed to get from it.

Create mood with narrative for more universal results.

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Just going completely off-topic: I disagree with you here KM. I don't believe you should make music an integral part of a story, because obviously if the reader doesn't know the song, then you're screwed. However I think maybe adding a song as background music can really help build a scene and add a bit of lustre. I have been known to put on a particular song while reading a story that 'name-checked' the song as playing in the background.

However, this may be why KM's won hundreds of things and is a great author and I'm just me. For an example of music helping build a scene, my story - All About Touch isn't a bad effort IMHO.

The Earl

I don't resally see why having song lyrics in a story would harm the recognition factor. Quite the oppsit really.

Sometimes a piece of song lyric exceeds the regular way that we think of copyrights. A quote from a song is one of the more recognizeable parts of pop culture references that you can get. If I start a story with something like this, the song is well justified IMO.

---
"All the lonely people, where do they all come from?"

The old Beatles classic came trickling down from the speaker of the battered old transistor radio, as I sat and stirred my long since cold cup of coffee. I knew the answer. They all came from here. Newark, New Jersey. Sad single capital of America. No, make that the world.
---

And as far as I know, you are fully allowed to make a reasonable quote in a literary work. Unless your work was a slander of the song in question, this would result in no liability. At least not according to local pagan law here in Elk-land.

There's a link below that will give you the low down on Copyright and Interlectual Property Rights.

It is written from a UK bias but the C / IPR sections are pretty much international. It gives guidance on C / IPR on Internet.

There is a lot of useful stuff in this link from Digital Imagery to HTML coding.

http://vads.ahds.ac.uk/guides/creating_guide/contents.html

Will's


http://www.literotica.com/stories/showstory.php?id=116799
A'adgt's Initiation - A story of Alien Incest

writerotica said:

I like to use lyrics of particular songs in my stories in order to create a mood. Can anyone tell me if there is a legal risk in doing this and posting the story here?

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Risk? Probably minimal.
Legal? Definitely not.
Just as you would have to go to extreme expense and waste
lots of time to hunt down the guys who steal your stories,
so would the holders of the copyrights for those songs.
OTOH, just 'cause they probably wouldn't come after you
doesn't make it morally right.
I'm thinking of reasonably contemporary songs here; some
music is old enough to be out of copyright. You're safe
quoting "Greensleeves," but not "Let it be" or even
"I'm dreaming of a white Christmas."

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

snooper said:

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Click to expand...

That is one of the more cogent posts I've seen on here lately. Certainly more meaningful than any of my own.
MG
Ps. I've used a line from a famous song many time in my stories and have never had any trouble. Everyone knows it: "I gotta gut fulla whiskey anna mouf fulla muff."

I don't know?

There's nothing like a familiar lyric to set the tone of you're action story.

"There's a red man waiting out there,
fixin' to take my hair –
A coward I've been called,
'cause I don't want to wind up dead or bald!"

When it comes to erotica, a small snatch of song, if one can identify it does so much to aid the story.

". . . your love is some dust in an old man's cough
who is tapping his foot to a tune,
and your thighs are a ruin, you want too much,
let's say you came back some time too soon. . ."

Even a simple movie quote can do it!

"Am I right? Or, am I right? Or, am I right? E'r right! Right! Right! Right!"