A famous writer/poem say Shakespeare has written some poems and quotes and i find it on some website, can i copy it and use it on my website?? is that breaking a law?? my second question "does anyone hold any copyright on famous saying, qoutes and poems from 20th century or before that?? can i use them on my website?" thanks in advance..
Shakespeare's writings are in the public domain and you can do anything you want with them. The number of years after a person's death that the copyright on their works exprires has changed over time. These days it's some absurdly high number - usually closely tracking the number of years since the death of Walt Disney, oddly enough. But Shakespeare's descendants haven't lobbied Congress well enough to get it extended that far.
SmallPotatoes thanks for ur post... but can anyone else give me some different perspective about this??
You are going to have to check each one individually, there is no blanket answer to cover famous quotes and saying from the entire 20th Century. Some are protected, some are public domain. I can tell you with certainty that anything from Entertainment or Advertising is most certainly protected. Usually you can get a way with a simple quotation by giving credit to the source, but you cannot take something like "Where's the Beef?" (from the 1980's Wendy's T.V ads), or "Let's Get Ready To Rumble!" (Michael Buffer) and just decide to use it on your site...things like that are protected.