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You are your number one advocate. Do not depend on an agent or publisher or editor to find and get permission for any words or lyrics you might reference in your stories. At the end of the day, your reputation and profit will be the one to suffer if you infringe on someone else's rights.

Inform yourselves and decide if that which you reference is important enough to keep and then have to seek out permission. You might have to seek permission from various people or companies.

This moment of consideration can be a good thing. Some references date a story or hide lazy writing. Some are placeholders we forgot to replace, and you might surprise yourself with a better option.

For some of you your reference is pivotal to a scene or setting or plot, and in this case, you will have to track down whom that work belongs to if it is not yet public domain.

You might actually wanna dig through public domain content and use that instead.

With today's technology, do not think that your book will not be found, especially if you reference well known works. Currently there are companies who's sole purpose is to sift through the internet to find infringements.

If Stephen King has to pay to reference lyrics... so does everyone else.

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Y'all can look up this thread and read through all the responses. Below is an important link someone shared:

https://www.janefriedman.com/the-fair-use-doctrine/amp/?__twitter_impression=true

This is the website she mentioned so y'all can go check it out:

https://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/fair-use-what-transformative.html

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[The Creative Penn - featuring Helen Sedwick]

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If y'all have any more info to share, please let us know.

Make sure to look at all the links mentioned in the screenshots to better inform yourselves.

When in doubt, do not use someone else's content.
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