@fairy-anon-godmother I would ~love~ to know more, if you have the time to write out what else can't be used. :)
Ah, now this shall be interesting :D
(cracks knuckles; disclaimer, please bear in mind that this is just my experience in the particular field, publisher and subjects I work for/on, plus I work in academic publishing rather than trade, and permissions are not my speciality!
They say seventy years after death, but really unless the author is at least eighty years dead - copyright expiration after death varies from country to country - you need permission to quote more than a tiny bit of their poetry, one line of a song of theirs (music rights holders are seriously strict; we often tell authors ‘just don’t bother, it’s not worth it’)* - or use a quote of theirs as an epigraph. Same goes for photographs, artwork, etc. Plus there’s sometimes estates.
If you want to include a photo of a currently alive person in the book, you need to get their permission; if you don’t or if they refuse, it’s a legal breach of privacy. Crowd scenes are a bloody nightmare. As a result our office just vetoes pictures of living people or anyone who might still be alive, unless it’s the author/editor themselves, even if it’s a photo from the 1920s/30s, period. It saves everyone so much hassle.
I’ve never had to deal with this one personally, but if you use a screen capture of a website page in a book, you need permission. You need permission to quote tweets. If you quote extensively from posts on a website, permission. Likewise for advertisements, posters, CD covers, etc; they take months and months to clear, although you can use ones that were first published 70 years ago and more, which obviously doesn’t work for social media.
If you use a diagram from someone else’s book, even if it’s a relatively simple line diagram, you need permission. Even if you redraw it yourself, you still need permission. You can describe it instead (oh blessed paraphrasing!!!). If you use a fairly complicated table from someone else’s book, you need permission; they might have used Excel to create it, but the information and research it presents is their intellectual property! By that same token, you can’t amend a table or diagram, whether by translating titles, or adding or removing data, without permission. However; if, for instance, you take the data in a table and create a graph based on it, that creates a new copyright, which you can cite as ‘based upon’.
While we’re on the subject, you can never modify text quotations without permission, except to correct clear typographical errors. Even if they’re only italicising certain words for emphasis, my authors always note ‘emphasis is my own’ to show the difference from the original publication.
Film, television and video game stills and frame grabs - amazingly, you can actually use these without having to seek permission, although you still need to be careful. They have to be properly and fully credited with the film title, studio etc, and they have to be critically discussed, not just put in for window dressing.
Those are the major ones, and now I’ve thought far more about work outside of my working hours than I’m comfortable with!
* Even if you’re a major author/publisher you still have to pay through the nose for song lyrics; which is why, in Anansi Boys, Neil Gaiman does not actually quote the songs that his characters sing during their karaoke stints, but instead gets around copyright issues by paraphrasing the lyrics. I would argue that this is a definite improvement, and also hilarious.
