How can they do this?

P

PITT59

New member
How can Simpsons, Family Guy, and Robot Chicken are allowed to say the names of pop culture without any copyright claim? And I doubt they would let them do it cuz they are making fun of them. Isn't it illegal?
 
No. It isn't. See the following Supreme Court cases:

Irving Berlin et.al. vs. E.C. Publications, Inc. (which was a precedent case involving parody in 1964) and Campbell v. Acuff-Rose Music, Inc. (a 1994 case that ruled that commercial parody can be fair use, even if profits are made). Both cases made it possible for Mad Magazine, Saturday Night Live, The Simpsons, Family Guy, Robot Chicken and other comedic shows to mock and make fun of the culture of the day.
 
Yeah. I mean, if parody was illegal, 4Kids would have been sued by WB when they inserted a line in Mew Mew Power that went like this: "I can't see without my glasses". See what I mean?

Besides, parody is a sub-genre, like in Duel Masters.
 
...Besides, any and all Robot Chicken fans know the show has the following disclaimer preceding its intro:



Sorta OT, but on a similar note, in Mrs. Doubtfire, the producers got away with Robin Williams singing "Don't Rain on My Parade" during his Barbara Streisand impersonation because the copyright holders thought it was a parody, even though they denied the producers rights to the song.

^^^This proves that copyright holders can sometimes sympathise with parodies, but producers must take every precaution to prevent lawsuits.
 
Sometimes it's a matter of copyright issue of what's safe and what's not, and copyright infringement can still be put against you in some cases. I think the rule is that you must have at least 7 things different about the person/place/thing to get away with it, or else it's copyright infringement... but usually a parody is free game otherwise.
 
That's different, though. Al was told that he HAD permission to do the song, but then was told after it was recorded that Coolio was actually offended by it. Not that it mattered; Al could do the parody if he wanted without Coolio's blessing, but he asked anyway because he's just that kind of guy.
 
Sometimes it's just a matter of wanting to avoid taking a lot of time and trouble to defend yourself against a frivolous lawsuit. For example, when Weird Al parodied James Blunt's "You're Beautiful" as "You're Pitiful," he phoned up Mr. Blunt and asked permission, because Al's a nice guy like that. Blunt gave him permission, but his record label (who actually own the copyright) objected and threatened to sue if Al put the song on the album.

Now, Al could have gone to court over it, and he almost certainly would have won. But that would have been a lot of hassle, so instead he just released the song for free over the Internet. Al's fans got the song, it made for a nice free promo for his album (which I very much doubt suffered any loss in sales over one song being missing anyway), and Atlantic Records backed down. Everyone wins except the dirty bloodsucking lawyers. (-:
 
It's not like Doremi didn't have parody before 4Kids got its hands on it.

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Here is another example:
ICarly has SplashFace which is obviously Youtube
Would they get sued if ICarly talked about going on Youtube instead of SplashFace?
 
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