It’s not stealing, it’s PARODY.
Artists slave away in their studios to create record-breaking music, box-office winning movies, best-selling books, life-altering poems, and jaw dropping paintings only to have other amateur “artists” create parodies of their works. For a long while, there was no such thing as a parody: it was called copyright infringement. The parody artists take the works of others and add their own twist to it. It’s a little like an innovation of an original invention, and sometimes end up more popular than the original song or work of art.
2 Live Crew faced a very close call with their parody of Roy Orbison’s Pretty Woman.
Leonardo Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa, one of the best-known paintings of all time, has gotten its fair share of duck faces, cat whiskers, and bat masks.
“Wierd Al” Yankovic does parodies of a lot of popular songs, his most famous one being of Chamillionaire’s “Ridin'”. Wierd Al’s “White and Nerdy” has gotten 91 million views, compared to Chamillionaire’s 47 million.
James Joyce’s Ulysses is considered a parody of Homer’s Odyssey and T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land.
YouTube personality “ChokeOnFunny” sings a parody of Eminem’s “Rap God.” (The parody is nowhere near as popular as the original song, but it has gotten more than 450,000 views.)
Even Walt Disney, who is basically the creator of our childhoods, has gotten a parody by YouTube personality “Paint” dedicated to his works. Paint has gotten more than 42 million views on his Disney parody.
Some argue that a parody can also be seen as a form of free publicity for an artist and their work of art. The parody will never substitute the original because the two hold “separate market functions.” Others argue that the parody takes away the importance of the original song, and the artists make money off of another’s work.
Are parodies a form of copyright infringement? Should they be protected by the Fair Use Doctrine and/or the First Amendment? Should parodies and covers of various forms of art be made money off of? Are their exceptions?
I don’t think that parodies are a form of copyright issues. Most of the time, as long as people creating the parodies are acknowledging where the original source is from, there should be no problems. Parodies are a form of expression, which is protected by the First Amendment. People cannot pretend like the parodies are made of scratch from their own sources; as long as they acknowledge where the song came from, it is acceptable. I don’t necessarily think that immense money should be made off of parodies, as they are just altering an original copy of something. There’s probably random exceptions, but that should be left to a case-by-case basis, with the appropriation and acceptance of every artist involved.
Parodies are a creative outlet in which people are able to alter a media they tend to like. It is a way for people to actively express their opinions or simply make fun of something while using an entertaining medium. Usually they acknowledge that they are simply altering an original work for their own purposes, thus giving credit to the source. It is because of this that I don’t think that they are infringing any copy right issues. They should indeed be protected by both the Fair Use Doctrine and the First Amendment, the former given that it tends to be quite obvious when something is a parody, especially if it the original source is part of popular culture, the latter because for some it is a channel through which some speak out their thoughts.
As long as the parodied version is not falsely credited. Or not falsely credited rather separated from the original artist/creator. Creating a parody is an art of its own and I should be protected under the 1st amendment. While some artists might take offense to their work being parodied it brings them extra attention in a more indirect way, while people get enjoyment and laughter out of the parody they still make reference to the original, if not in conversation subliminally, they think about, for instance, Homer’s The Odyssey in the Simpsons Episode “Tales from the Public Domain”, all while watching The Simpsons you still think about where the material comes from and what the original piece of art is.
I do not think that parodies should be subject to copyright concerns. To start, the Supreme Court has determined that 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.” Therefore, as long as the parody is making a statement about the original author’s work, then it isn’t an issue. Furthermore, in the U.S. we have the fair use doctrine, which permits limited use of a copyrighted work for things such as parody. Based on this, I think that parody is an artistic work just like the original is and it should therefore be protected under the first amendment.