Today we're going to be talking about parody and examples of parody.
When we think about parody,
one thing to keep in mind is parody is by its nature a derivative work.
We're going to give two examples of parody both
of which are derivative works and we'll talk about
why they are parody and not otherwise a derivative work that might be prohibited.
We'll have a discussion of each of these two examples of parody.
The first example is an interesting video by Eric Faden a professor at Stanford about
copyright and this is a good video for you to watch
because you'll learn something from it as well as enjoying the parody.
It's funny and educational.
It's used in teaching principles related to copyrights,
so very relevant to this course.
Now if you might have noticed as you were watching this video,
you may have seen the FBI warning at the beginning.
Probably you didn't read it.
You didn't pay any attention because FBI warnings
are common on many videos but this one is different.
It's not like any FBI warning you've ever seen before.
Because of its uniqueness, its newsworthiness,
its educational value, I've reproduced it here for you to see and take a look at this.
Federal law allows citizens to do certain things
and allows it without authorization and we call that fair use.
It's allowed for a variety of purposes.
This is a cool message.
It's a different message from
most FBI warnings and because it's so intriguingly different,
it's funny and informative.
The next, also a very funny thing.
You might have noticed at the beginning the Walt Disney said bold and the sound,
it sounds like this is a Walt Disney video
but it's not and it says that clearly at the top of the screen,
"The following film is not associated with and not authorized by and should not be
confused with any product produced by Walt Disney."
So if you're not paying attention you may think you're about
to watch a Disney video but he says,
"No, no, it's the opposite."
This is the inherent nature of parody.
You're copying Walt Disney,
that's a derivative work,
logo icon, that's Disney's copyright but you're parodying it.
You're making fun of it.
So it's funny and therefore allowed.
Why was this short film not taken down by YouTube?
Many things are taken down by YouTube when they're derivative works but in
this case it's clearly funny and it's easy to see that fair use can,
should and would apply for this video.
It's a clear and obvious example of parody.
Even if Disney tried to get it taken down and I suspect they did not even try,
but even if they had tried,
YouTube would have said no.
So it's unlikely Disney would even try.
Why would fair use apply?
Well, first this is parody.
Parody is the purpose of use and when that happens you've got a really good defense.
Almost nothing else matters.
If it's viewed by a judge as parody, you're going to win.
It's also educational and educational particularly as it was used
at first in class face to face has a very strong defense,
but it is artistic expression.
Everything in here comes from fiction movies entertainment.
That would be against the fair use author.
Reverse proportionality is an interesting one because if
you looked at proportionality you would say very
little of any of these clips come from the Disney film that was the original source.
It's only a few seconds of each movie but if you look at it from a reverse perspective,
this asks the question,
"How much of my final work comes from this other person who's suing me?"
Almost all of this comes from Disney films,
a variety of films but the source material is Disney,
so Disney may have a reverse proportionality argument.
In terms of economic harm,
very unlikely to be any economic harm for Disney.
So it looks like fair use is a reasonable defense,
reverse proportionality will favor Disney,
the artistic expression favors Disney but the overall winning criteria here is parody.
Another parody is a parody by Green Day of Green Day.
That may sound bizarre.
They parodied themselves and that's exactly what happened.
Green Day had an original music video called Good Riddance,
very popular, very successful,
made good money on it.
They go on to Stephen Colbert's show on television and they say,
"Hey, maybe..." Stephen says,
"You know, I'd love to sing that with you."
They say, "Well, we could sing it on your show."
And Stephen says, "No, we can't afford that."
No, CBS, no way would they approve that.
Now Green Day in theory could say, "Oh no, you don't have to pay us.
We just perform it because we like you and this would be fun."
But the best answer to that is Green Day does not own Green Day's video.
Green Day does not own Green Day's song or the music.
They sold it to a studio who promoted
it and they get paid royalties but they can't give it away.
They can't perform it for free and the studio owns
the rights as the author of that music but what they could do is do a parody of it.
So they did what they called an affordable lyrics version where they use
the lyrics of another song to sing with their Green Day Good Riddance song.
The fact they used the lyrics of a public domain song Camptown Races.
This makes it a funny parody.
They're using the lyrics of a well-known song to parody their own song.
It's a parody of Green Day's music and song because they don't own the copyright
but they do have the right to make a parody
of their own music or of somebody else's music.
It's expensive to perform music on
late TV shows or any TV show because the royalty payments that you can
ask for can be quite high for a TV show or a movie and so it's not like a dollar or two.
You're talking quite a bit of money but by doing a parody,
they don't have to pay anything.
So that's some examples of parody, some intriguing examples.
I think the best example there is the parody example
from Green Day of them parodying themselves.