Forum Moderators: not2easy
I just signed up for WW, but have been reading it for a bit on my hubby's computer. This site is VERY helpful.
My question is on the copyright laws of jokes and riddles.
Does anyone know where I can find this information. I have searched everywhere, but the basic laws don't seem to fit. I mean most jokes and riddles are the same things repackaged and been around forever. Would the riddle be public domain but the explaination be copyrighted? Would you need to change "apple" to "orange" in a joke to make it not a violation? It's hard to be original with jokes/riddles if they've all been told before.....
Could you just go to a joke/riddle site and take some for your page? If not where would you find ones to use?
I have no desire to do any copyright infringing, but I am very confused.
Thanks for any help you can give :)
Jokes may fall into the same category as math problems - they follow basic formats, but the details often change. The copyright is in the presentation. You can't copyright 2 + 2 = 4, but the exact wording of a story problem involving two priests and two rabbis could be protected. The sequence of a series of math problems might also be protected, i.e., a set of fifty arithmetic questions.
So, back to your jokes... rewriting individual jokes may not be entirely risk-free, but it would be relatively hard to prove infringement unless the joke was quite unique. If a series of jokes on your site bore an uncanny resemblance to a set of jokes on another site, your risk would be higher. Of course, word-for-word copying would be riskier still. Undoubtedly, of course, many jokes are so common or so old that they are much like standard math problems - the copyright lies in the presentation and the compilation rather than the individual elements.
This whole area could be messy... there are lots of marginal joke sites, and even if you asked permission you may not be dealing with the original copyright holder.
And, by the way, did ya hear the one about the webmaster, two priests, and two rabbis who walked into a bar...? ;)
I've seen countless thousands of humor sites covering all sorts of topics.
To be honest.. I wouldn't even bother creating a web site in that market niche. There are more sites in that market than you could possibly imagine, and they all either take a risk and copy content from elsewhere, or they license syndicated content for a "cookie cutter" site.
Unless you have original content, or alternatively unless you can be the most comprehensive archive of jokes and riddles ever, then you'll be wasting your time.
You would be suprised at just how many lawsuits are floating around in the humor webmaster world.
So.. my personal recommendation is to create something original, and make sure you plaster the site with enough copyright notices to put off site copiers.
"What is this ...
... a joke?"
Dave Barry has had his assistant call a friend of mine and tell her to remove several of his stories which people posted un-attributed to one of her forums. He was not amused and was not willing to provide permission.
Several other notable humorists and authors have contacted her to negotiate the proper attribution and links back to their original work.
It can be worthwhile but mostly it gets very messy.
Best bet is to seek the permission of the original content owner and if that is not clear, to build your own content.
I'm not doing a joke site, as much as a riddle site for kids, which goes along with a network of kid sites I already own. I realize compilations are copyrighted so I'm not trying to just copy someone elses webpage, but I also noticed there are only so many riddles to use. I was basicly seeing the same riddles over and over again with different details. One uses dog, the next one uses cat, etc....
I will just have to look around and see what I can find. Maybe I will just get my friends to start telling me riddles :P Thanks for the help guys. There are just so many grey areas it's hard not to feel like you are doing SOMETHING wrong -lol-
What is and isn't fair use is completely up to the judge. So you want to play it as safe as you possibly can. Maybe even have it so that all of the riddles are user-submitted and you personally sort through them.
Strange how the legal system is so complex and yet manages to leave large senseless gaps.
That's one way, but another way it to have a good lawyer on hand. Playing it safe isn't always best, and if everyone did that we'd stagnate for sure.
Lawsuits are scary but more than that they are *expensive*. A good laywer knows alot about making a lawsuit get very expensive very fast for the other side, and how to negotiate a settlement agreement.
You may be surprised at how many times you start defending against a lawsuit, only to settle with them paying you money.
Creating riddles has been out of style for most of the last century, so you are sure to find that most of the good ones are from at least pre-television days. check out the folklore section of your library, I bet you will find something appropriate.
<added>I just did a search on [folklore children riddle] and came up with a lot of useful sites. There is even an ODP category. Don't assume that those listed are not protected by copyright, but you can probably mak a safe educated guess.</added>
