[tei-council] Copyright and fair use in Guidelines quotations

[David Sewell]

I'm turning to my Sourgeforge ticket item on creating an example of 
using <milestone> to mark change of speaker. As I indicated in Galway, 
the "Conversation with Death" made popular by the film "O Brother Where 
Art Thou?" offers a perfect example in its opening stanza:

         Oh what is this I cannot see
         With icy hands gets a hold on me
         Oh I am Death, none can excel
         I open the doors of heaven and hell

where the first two lines in the <lg> are spoken by the dying man,
the second two by Death.

I had assumed this was an old ballad in the public domain. Turns out,
oddly enough, there is strong evidence it was written by a North
Carolina preacher in 1916, and a transcription of it in a recent Journal
of Folkore Research issue bears a copyright line, "Copyright © 2003 by
Estate of Lloyd Chandler". Whether or not the copyright would stand up
in court (if the lyrics were ever published without copyright notice
before 1977, it is in the public domain under US law), what's the policy
on quoting in the Guidelines from a text claimed to be under copyright?
Using those four lines as an example would be protected under "fair use"
in US law, but is it best to avoid a quotation like this?

I can substitute lines from a similar broadsheet ballad if need be:

http://www.nls.uk/broadsides/broadside.cfm/id/14980/transcript/1

Advice?

-- 
David Sewell, Editorial and Technical Manager
ROTUNDA, The University of Virginia Press
PO Box 801079, Charlottesville, VA 22904-4318 USA
Courier: 310 Old Ivy Way, Suite 302, Charlottesville VA 22903
Email: dsewell at virginia.edu   Tel: +1 434 924 9973
Web: http://rotunda.upress.virginia.edu/