Tag Archives: Parody

Parodies: Pony Fabulous

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Today, I saw a very well done parody video of one of Taylor Swift’s new songs. After watching, I thought of its implications in terms of copyright, and decided that this video indeed fell under fair use. The purpose of the work is purely entertainment. Since this entertainment is geared, I suspect, to an audience who generally dislikes Swift, the effect on the original song’s potential market is null. With two of the four factors of fair use checked off, I would like to bring a bit of my frenemy Goldstein into this discussion. As noted from his discussion of software protection under copyright, copyright does not protect the method or process of a text, only its expression (191). The creator of this video certainly does not replicate Swift’s expression of her song, since he changes the lyrics entirely and score slightly; his message/theme is entirely different from hers. The sound itself can be thought of as the process: copying that is perfectly legal.

Only a few minutes after thinking of this blog post, I remembered another parody video of a different nature. This video was made by a TV station in order to promote its own show. Since I’m running out of space, I want to consider if this economic element changes the argument for fair use. What makes Equestria Girls different from I Knew Gary Was Trouble? Do they fall under the same or different cases of fair use?

Parodies

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I was watching the latest episode of saturday night live and started to think about what constituted original content. Many of the saturday night skits are made from the parodying of other media and popular culture. In 1994 the Supreme Court justified a parody under fair use because a parody is the “use of some elements of a prior author’s composition to create a new one that, at least in part, comments on that author’s works.” Like other forms of comment or criticism, parody can provide social benefit, “by shedding light on an earlier work, and, in the process, creating a new one.” I never really thought about parodies, such as the ones Weird Al creates, in this way before.