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Location: Born in L.A. - NYC is Second Home - Rustbelt is Home Base
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Is OK to use the name of a famous Beatles song for the title of my book? Or is there a copyright problem? The book has nothing to do with the song or the Beatles.
That's a bit of an overstatement. The prototype of a title subject to copyright would be Ezra Pound's "In a Station of the Metro," a poem whose title is it's first line. Here is the test:
"To be protected by copyright, a work must contain a certain minimum
amount of authorship in the form of original literary, musical, pictorial, or
graphic expression."
Titles can meet that test, but often they do not.
Of course, even where a title is subject to copyright, fair use carves out some room to use it. Fair use does not appear to apply in the OP. The question is, what is the song title? Yesterday is certainly no problem, but Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Heart's Club Band? It might be.
That's a bit of an overstatement. The prototype of a title subject to copyright would be Ezra Pound's "In a Station of the Metro," a poem whose title is it's first line. Here is the test:
"To be protected by copyright, a work must contain a certain minimum
amount of authorship in the form of original literary, musical, pictorial, or
graphic expression."
Titles can meet that test, but often they do not.
Of course, even where a title is subject to copyright, fair use carves out some room to use it. Fair use does not appear to apply in the OP. The question is, what is the song title? Yesterday is certainly no problem, but Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Heart's Club Band? It might be.
The Beatles song Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Heart's Club Band is, as I pointed out before, not copyrighted. As a title, it cannot be. That is copyright law.
However - again, as I previously pointed out - while titles cannot be copyrighted, they can be trademarked if they are sufficiently original. Yesterday? Not a chance. Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Heart's Club Band? I would be very surprised if whatever agency currently owns that song does not also possess trademark protection for it.
And, no, it doesn't matter if the title is repeated in the work. Lyrics, for example, have copyright protection automatically conveyed upon their creation. Yet that doesn't make the pulled-from-the-lyrics title copyrighted. Think about it - the vast majority of popular music songs take their titles from their lyrics. The odd song that doesn't, such as Bohemian Rhapsody - is the unusual exception.
One of my clients did it, twice--he's a music junkie and makes it a theme in all his stuff--and hasn't gotten any flak yet for either book. And both have sold well enough that, from a legal standpoint, there's something to go after.
Whether or not it's required, it would still be "good form" to at least acknowledge the origin of the title in the Foreword or Acknowledgments section.
For example, Wally Lamb wrote She's Come Undone and politely acknowledged the song by The Guess Who, even though The Guess Who spelled it "Undun." But then he wrote I Know This Much Is True, and he did not acknowledge the band Spandau Ballet. People like me got a little irked at that. Not a big deal, and not illegal, but just the decent thing to do.
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