Short answer: for an ordinary personal post, yes, and nobody is coming after
you. It gets more complicated when money is involved. Here is the honest version.
This is not legal advice. We are a text
library, not a law firm, and copyright differs by country. If real money depends
on the answer, ask a lawyer rather than a captions site.
Personal posts
Posting a lyric or a quote on your own social account, not selling anything,
is what these collections are for. It is normal, universal, and not something
rights holders pursue. Crediting the artist or author is good manners and takes
four words.
The realistic risk is not legal. It is that a platform’s automated system
flags music in audio – that is a different thing from lyrics as text,
and text captions do not trigger it.
Where it changes: commercial use
Song lyrics are protected, and the protection is enforced more actively than
most people expect. Treat these as needing a licence:
- Merchandise – shirts, prints, mugs, stickers carrying a lyric
- Paid advertising, including boosted posts selling something
- Thumbnails, titles or overlays on monetised video
- Anything you sell where the lyric is part of what people are buying
The rule of thumb: if the lyric is decoration on something personal, you are
fine. If the lyric is the product, you need permission.
Quotes are different from lyrics
Short quotations with attribution sit on much safer ground than lyrics, partly
because a sentence is often too short to be protected at all, and partly because
quoting is a normal, expected use. Reproducing whole poems or long passages is
not the same thing, and gets treated the same way as lyrics.
Public domain
Work old enough for copyright to have expired can be used freely, including
commercially. In the United States that currently means works published before
1930, and the threshold moves forward each year. This is where Shakespeare,
Austen, Dickinson and most classical quotations sit. Terms differ elsewhere –
much of the world uses the author’s life plus 70 years.
What our labels mean
- A named author. We traced the line to that person and
checked it against more than one independent source. - Anonymous. The line is genuinely in circulation but we could
not establish who wrote it. We use this instead of guessing – see our
editorial guidelines for why. - Disputed. Sources disagree about who said it, and we have
shown you the disagreement rather than picking the version that reads best.
If you are using something commercially, do not rely on our attribution as
clearance. It is a research note, not a rights check.
If you hold the rights
If your work appears here and you want it credited differently or removed,
[email protected] reaches the editor directly, and our copyright
policy sets out the formal process. We would rather take something down than
argue about it.