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[projectsjh]

Situation: Publishing houses are not responding at all to requests to use paragraphs, diagrams from other professors (that appear alot elsewhere, sometimes "with permission," usually not).  My understanding is:

1) Paragraph: Properly cited, one can copy a paragraph. Publishers' guidelines decades ago were pretty generous about how long that paragraph could be.  Now publishers get nervous about anything over 30 or 40 words.

2) Poem   If inside that paragraph there were a short poem, such as a haiku, you could NOT use it. The haiku is an "entity," and has as such has full copyright protection.

3) Box, diagram, chart What about if inside the 30 word paragraph there are words arranged in boxes, or written as part of a diagram (an x axis and y axis label), with an arrow, etc. Do diagrams, per se, enjoy the "entity" protection poems do?

Or is it a quesiton of the entire paragraph: It exceeds permissible attributed usage, or is allowable, regardless of a box or diagram inside it?

[Zonath]

It sounds like you're asking about fair use.  In general, your fair use criteria are contained in 17 USC § 107:

(1) the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;
(2) the nature of the copyrighted work;
(3) the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and
(4) the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.

Your hypothetical situations pretty much only address factor (3) of the test, and without really knowing more about (1), (2) and (4), there's hardly any way to really give any kind of answer on solid footing.  Publisher guidelines are usually tailored in order to make use of a fair use defense, but even well-seasoned publishers get it wrong from time to time, so if you're really worried about infringement, you should be talking to your own copyright counsel.

[BobRoberts]

Re: 3 - charts...  Information is not protected by Copyright, but in limited circumstances, creativity in providing the information may be.  So if the information is merely and strictly a list of, say, height of person vs. ideal weight, I would see this as information with no creativity, and thus no Copyright protection.  If the diagram included fancy/cutsie graphics interspersed therein, the creativity of those graphics, as interspersed, may be protectable to preventing exact copying (but not use of the information provided by the chart).  Creativity may be protected, but information is not.

Good luck.