Okay, question for the hivemind, especially those of the legal and/or librarian like persuasion. What, if any, are the copyright restrictions on old newspaper articles/headlines?
Here's the thing-- the story I'm currently working on is set in 1964-5 and I'm having a devil of a time giving a real sense of the time without using the 2x4 of "OMG, the Beatles, EEEEEEEE!!!" or somesuch. So I thought if I could put a headline or a leadline from an article before every chapter-- or every two or three chapters-- it would be a cool way to alert the reader to not only the time period, but where we are in the story, how much time has elapsed. (It can be a real sticky issue when you're writing in First Person since the narrator isn't necessarily going to be thinking "Wow, three weeks has passed since X happened.")
Anyhow, is that something that would come under public domain after a period of time or if, say, the newspaper is no longer in existence, but I could find a scan on the internet of what a headline from January 1, 1959 would have looked like?
HALP
I think small snippets like that come under "fair use".
You're not reproducing the bulk of a work, you're not portraying it as your own... someone more legal should weigh in to be sure though.
Hi, Bitches. What's the haps?
t tackles smonster, flourishes her with kisses.
Barb, it's not in the public domain (I think the counter is all the way up to 1923 on that? At any rate, way before the 60s...), and the newspaper's current existence doesn't matter either way. HOWEVER, the kind of brief quotation you're describing is widely considered to be fair use even though the material is copyrighted -- just as you could reference "Dewey Defeats Truman". Write what you want, keep a list of where the headlines come from, and let the publisher's rights office sweat it if they worried that the use isn't fair.
t tacklehugs Aims and smonster
Empress kisses, yay!
Hi amych. You around over the holidays?
t flourishes kisses on Seany
Headlines are probably covered by copyright (there's been no determination -- if they were found to be titles, they wouldn't be covered, but there's a good enough chance the courts wouldn't consider them a title).
IMHO, and my law degree is certainly very, very dusty, if you spread your headlines among different papers and don't copy any of the article that goes with them, it's going to be considered de minimis -- the courts won't concern themselves with a trifle.
eta:
::tacklehugs smonster::
