Fair Use, Free Use, and Use by Permission: How to Handle Copyrights in All Media

by Lee Wilson

Who needs this book? Only every writer, photographer, illustrator, designer, businessperson, musician, songwriter, filmmaker, teacher, researcher, advertiser, and Web designer in the United States. How to find copyright owners, request permissions, and keep records? Easy-reference copyright duration chart, form agreements, form letters, resources, and checklists; Permissions—they’re enough to make anyone crazy. Thank heavens there’s Fair Use, Free Use and Use by Permission, the one-volume reference that is sure to save the sanity of thousands of grateful readers. Writers, photographers, illustrators, designers, teachers, researchers—anyone involved with intellectual property needs this practical, straightforward guide to copyright law. Find out what constitutes fair use, how to get permissions, and how to protect creative work, plus learn about copyright infringement, public domain, and much more. Illuminating true-life stories enliven the ins and outs of copyright law, and helpful charts, resource lists, and forms make the permissions experience vastly more manageable. Let a respected intellectual property lawyer show the way through the copyright maze!

Allworth Press, an imprint of Skyhorse Publishing, publishes a broad range of books on the visual and performing arts, with emphasis on the business of art. Our titles cover subjects such as graphic design, theater, branding, fine art, photography, interior design, writing, acting, film, how to start careers, business and legal forms, business practices, and more. While we don't aspire to publish a New York Times bestseller or a national bestseller, we are deeply committed to quality books that help creative professionals succeed and thrive. We often publish in areas overlooked by other publishers and welcome the author whose expertise can help our audience of readers.

256 pages, Paperback

First published November 1, 2005

About the author

All I Have to Do Is Dream: the Boudleaux and Felice Bryant Story is Lee Wilson’s sixteenth book. She is a Nashville writer and intellectual-property lawyer whose nonfiction credits include a dozen books on intellectual-property law topics published by the Allworth Press imprint of Skyhorse Publishing, and the forthcoming So God Created Mothers: A Collection of Lively Quotations about Mothers and the Families They Love from independent publisher Two Creeks Press. All I Have to Do Is Dream is the second title from Two Creeks Press, which debuted in spring 2017 with Death of a Rhinestone Cowboy by Jenna Brown, the first in a female-sleuth fiction series.

Wilson’s intellectual property titles range from The Copyright Guide: a Friendly Guide to Protecting and Profiting from Copyrights (latest edition 2017), a handbook for anyone who creates, acquires, or exploits copyrights, to The Trademark Guide; Making It in the Music Business: a Business and Legal Guide for Songwriters and Performers; and Fair Use, Free Use, and Use by Permission: Using and Licensing Copyrights in All Media.

She is president of Two Creek Press, and for nearly a decade she was president of Magellan Press, whose titles included the Where the Locals Eat® series of U.S. restaurant guides, the “romantic cities” photographic guidebooks series (including Romantic New York City and Romantic San Francisco), and other non-fiction books. Wilson also compiled and published Women Hold Up Half the Sky: 285 Spirited Women and What They Said About Life, Love, Work, and Men. A previous small-run edition of All I Have to Do Is Dream: the Boudleaux and Felice Bryant Story (House of Bryant Publications), which included a DVD documentary movie of the same name, was published as a boxed-set compilation of songs written by the famous early Nashville songwriters.

Wilson has written for the Vanderbilt Journal of Entertainment Law and Practice and has published numerous articles on intellectual-property law for "CommunicationArts" magazine and the Publishers Marketing Association "Independent." She published biographical essays in Crossroads: A Southern Culture Annual 2009 (Ida B. Wells) and "Border States: Journal of the Kentucky-Tennessee American Studies Association" (Dorothy Dix). Wilson is a graduate of Rhodes College and the University of Tennessee College of Law. In private practice in Nashville since 1984, she served on the boards of the scholarly "Cumberland Poetry Review" and the Sinking Creek Film Festival, and was founding president of the Tennessee Writers Alliance.

For more information contact Lee Wilson, Two Creeks Press, P.O. Box 120847, Nashville, TN 37212; TwoCreeksPress@Hughes.net; 615/746-0219.