Need Copyright help writing a book. Please help!

If you are writing anything besides original content, the best thing to do would be to consult a copyright attorney for what all you can use and what you can't. It's certainly better than guessing, or trying to interpret all the ins and outs of the law yourself.

Even if we told you some accepted general practices, none of us know exactly what is in your book, or how you are using the non-original content.

Kathryn

Ok, so everyone's asking for a lawyer's opinion and here it is...

First, yes. You are allowed to name other companies in your book under the fair use exception for commentary and critique. However, fair use requires that you use only the smallest portion that is necessary to identify that company.

For example, if you were talking about McDonalds, you're allowed to do that. You're not required to call it "the fast food restaurant that uses the golden arches as it's logo", but you're not allowed to use the name, the logo and the slogan to identify the company. The name is sufficient to establish who you're talking about.

The next problem that you're going to have is that you're skating a very thin line between acceptable speech and libel. Defamation of these companies will very likely not only get you sued, but you'll lose. Make sure that you don't say anything untrue and that nothing gets stated as fact that is only an opinion.

As far as registration, the US Copyright Office (U.S. Copyright Office) doesn't want people showing up at their offices. You can send in your registration and they will send you a certificate. If you're worried about privacy, get a P.O. Box or have it sent to your publisher or lawyer's office.

That being said, you don't have to register in the US to have copyright protection. Once it's written, it's protected. Just make sure you have it printed out with the computer's date stamp on it to evidence your completion date.

As far as other countries, signatory countries to the Berne Convention or the Universal Copyright Convention will honor your US copyright. You can find more information here:
U.S. Copyright Office - International Copyright

The dictionary definitions are a stickier problem. There is argument about whether they're an original expression or not and therefore protected by copyright law. My view is that they are sufficiently original to warrant copyright protection. I would suggest either getting permission from the author/publisher of the dictionary to use them with attribution to the source or I would suggest writing your own.

Now to the final, and most important, question. Are you going to get sued? It's likely that you will. I've done a lot of work for "adult" sites and they have the resources to fight you if they get their backs up.

My advice would be to be as careful as possible. You might even want to have an attorney review any of the sections that you think might be defamatory.

Hope that helps. Let me know if you have other questions.

Deena
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Any opinions are offered without knowledge of the specific law of your jurisdiction and with only the limited information provided in your post. No advice given here should be reasonably relied upon by you or any third party without consulting an attorney who is aware of all of the facts and law surrounding your situation. Any advice given here is not intended to create an attorney-client relationship in any way.