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What Protections Exist for Parody Sites?
jolchefske asks: "I'm a small time guy running a small time parody website of a medium sized school district. My site lampoons the real website of the Seattle School District -- a district currently over 30 million dollars in the hole due to accounting "irregularities." My question is, what protections (if any) do parody websites have against copyright litigation? The district is 30+ mil in the red but they've got the lawyers knocking on my door."
No, seriously. I'm not a lawyer. Neither is most of the other folks around here. Maybe it would be best to actually call a lawyer in your own area and see what he/she says? Most have initial consultations for free...
Long, cute, or funny Sigs are just another form of over compensation, used by geeks, nerdz, etc.
I'm sure they're similar elsewhere.
[obligatory][lame]And, it's freedom of speech! LOL[/lame][/obligatory]
Karma: Excellent (fuck, even in the future moderation doesn't work!)
...taking down the site.
The /. effect will melt the servers down anyway...
And this is a clear-cut violation of IP laws. No judge would ever rule in your favor.
What exactly are they charging you with? Defamation?
Parody is not per se protected, but parodies can satisfy the fair use defense to copyright infringement. Check out the Supreme Court decision in Campbell v. Acuff-Rose. (I spent a looong time reading this case after it came out.) There are various tests applied by the court to draw the line.
Eff.org and chillingeffects.org have very good general guides to online free speech issues. Specific litigation advice must come from a lawyer licensed in your jurisdiction if things get ugly.
Look it up.
DO a search on supreme court ruling a parody and you will see there have been recent cases in the last 20 years that have protected parody.
The most blatant example of how protected Parody is, just at look at "the Simpsons"
DO you really think that they got the permission do use all the character they feature and make jokes about? No way. They are doing parody and thus dont need to worry about copyright or stepping on anyone's toes
Sigs are dangerous coy things
IANAL. That said, I think I'd build new icons, images, and work on making the site resemble the Seattle Public School site. You have some images that are very clearly mirrored and lightly tweaked. I think that might be damaging to you.
Also, If you are using html code from the SPS site, I'd ditch it. make your own.
You can make your site look VERY close to thiers, but there is a fine line.
Just my wild ass guess, but there ya go.
This came up for me once. Sometimes people just can't take a good yo' mamma joke.
When Stan Morris speaks, people listen.
Parody and Satire
Parody or satire is difficult to deal with, but if applied to a public figure is clearly protected by the First Amendment because the exaggeration or distortions of the truth are not intended to be taken as fact.
The case of Hustler Magazine, Inc. v. Fallwell is an example. In that case, Hustler Magazine printed a fake advertisement that parodied a Campari Liquer advertising campaign. In the Hustler publication, the advertisement contained a make-believe interview with Jerry Falwell, founder of the Moral Majority and a television evangelist, in which he talked about his "first time" to experience sexual intercourse. The vulgar "recounting" of Falwell's "first sexual encounter" was set in an outhouse with him having sex with his mother. Falwell, a teetotaler, was also portrayed as being drunk.
Falwell was outraged by this caricature, so outraged, in fact, that he sued. His lawsuit for libel, invasion of privacy and intentional infliction of emotional distress went to trial. At the close of the evidence, the district court said that even if everything Falwell claimed were true there were no legal grounds upon which he could claim relief. The balance of the case was submitted to the jury, which returned a verdict for Falwell for intentional infliction of emotional distress, although the jury disallowed the libel claim.
On appeal, the Supreme Court heard the case on the First Amendment question of whether a state has authority to protect its citizens from the intentional infliction of emotional distress and whether a public figure may recover damages for his or her distress.
Specifically, the Chief Justice said the issue was whether a state may protect its citizens from patently offensive speech, and he said the First Amendment provided a safe haven for even that mode of speech. The Chief Justice reasoned that even though Falwell was not a public figure who held elective office, he was a public figure who had influence on public affairs and, as such, only had limited capacity to be distressed. The Chief Justice wrote that: "robust political debate encouraged by the First Amendment is bound to produce speech that is critical of those that hold public office or those public figures who are 'intimately involved in the resolution of important public questions or by reason of their fame, shape events in area of concern to society at large.'"
The Chief Justice ruled that even so outrageous a rogue, or impish rascal, depending on your point of view, as Larry Flynt is entitled to exercise his First Amendment freedoms in a manner best determined by Flynt, rather than being restricted by any state action.
--By Stan Morris from Gigalaw.com
But there are limits it would seem. The creators of Parkwars originally planned to completely parody The Phantom Menace, but thought better of it, at least in part to make sure lawyers didn't come a knocking.
Mr. Morris seems to make a convincing case clearing the way to do what you will with your modest proposal. But the real snag might be copyright.
--Jimmy has fancy plans; and pants to match.
Cool, but useless.
You're assuming that what the law says is important (and it is) but the first question to ask, the more important question, is who has the deeper pockets.
Doesn't matter how much the law is in your favor if the other side can spend more than you can.
Everything in the Universe sucks: It's the law!
I looked at both sites and they looked identical. Parody isn't about just copy strait from another source. That's plagarism. Parody is about using a source in a different setting, or with a different plot, or with different characters. Parody should result in a different and often humorous meaning then the original source.
Consider the Apple Think Different Parody. Those were true parodies. They used the same format to put different actors in "thinking different" about different things. They weren't just ripping Apple's clips off of apple.com and voicing over "Apple Sucks". That would not have been parody.
-Brent
SLAPP (Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation) suits are illegal and Washington was the first state to make them illegal. Use google to read up on them and how you and your lawyer might use anti-SLAPP laws to keep the school district off your back. A friend of mine critized a public agency, they sued him, lost, then he countersued on the basis of them violating an anti-SLAPP law. He won a $1M+ judgement. I am not a lawyer and this is not legal advice.
"Eve of Destruction", it's not just for old hippies anymore...
You have little to fear provided you get a lawyer right away. Your site is a parody, presumably protected by the First Amendment, and it does not appear to have any content that could be termed libelous or obscene. I would observe that your site a) isn't very funny; b) isn't very robust; c) doesn't do a good job of explaining to someone like me, who is unfamiliar with Seattle or its school system, what it is that aggrieves you about it; d) links back to the official site in such a way as to confuse people. Maybe they will violate your civil rights and you can countersue.
Several people here have noted (correctly) that parody is considered "fair use"; there's a significant body of case law on this, and people here have provided links to some of that.
It's worth emphasizing, however, that fair use is a defense that you use in court, rather than a principle you cite to avoid court. As Brad Templeton notes in his 10 Big Myths about copyright explained,
So regardless of how solid your position may seem, if they're really coming after you, then you really do need a lawyer.No wonder they're so far in the red, with lawyers making house calls. Around here, the lawyers just send letters.
Oh, yea...you may wanna put a dislaimer on your site mentioning that it is just a parody, not to be confused with the real Seattle School District site. (Maybe put a goatse.cx link somewhere on there, too. That'll put some color back into the bloodless faces of the school board members.)
My god, these things are TOO easy.
Well, on "Ask Slashdot," yeah, duh. Nobody reads "Ask Slashdot" except know-it-alls, trolls, fp'ers, and people who love to say "A simple Google search would have given you the answer, you inconsiderate clod."
People saying that this site blatantly rips things from the public site are mistaken. There are many subtle changes which make it a parody and not possibly conceived as a copyright violation.
A nice touch is the "please visit our partners: Enron, Worldcom, Anderson, Coca-Cola," all companies that are either corrupt or have severe financial fraud issues and are bankrupt.
$eattle Public $chools, again clever.
And of course, all of the content is completely different -- hyperboles of the schools' hard-to-hyperbolize financial scandal.
The school has nothing to gripe about. They've fucked up and schould be criticized. In fact, everyone there involved in money-management should be fired off the bat, and prosecuted for some kind of fraud or another.
social sciences can never use experience to verify their statemen
Oou ought to be able to make whatever fun of them you want, even if the implications are false (see: www.bushoncrack.com). But legally, the bastard lawyers could probably win a libel lawsuit. IMHO that is a crock of shit because 99% of everything is a matter of opinion anyway. Congressman Baughtandbribed could sue every newspaper that claims he had an affair with the new intern, but he can't prove it didn't happen.
Repeal the DMCA!
I'd say that you're a PRIME candidate for a lawsuit. Not only are you obviously COPYING instead of RE-CREATING the content, but you're linking to porn. People are highly sensitive to that sort of thing, especially where schoolchildren are concerned.
If you plagiarized one of MY websites that way, I'd sue you, too.
The Web is like Usenet, but
the elephants are untrained.
One minor suggestion - perhaps you should add a more prominent disclaimer somewhere on the site?
Call me an idealist, but....
Amendment I
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.
Less Talk, More Beer.
Parody website is not funny.
A man who wants nothing is invincible
Gee ... so copyright must be unconstitutional?
No, wait, there's also a Copyright Clause in the Constitution.
I'm ribbing you a little; but my point is that First Amendment absolutism doesn't actually solve all that much. This is a tension within the Constitution itself, and I doubt the 1st A. was meant to amend away copyright.
I've seen before and like the "10 Myths" page, but should caution it is not completely thorough. But then, he only intended to point out 10 myths about copyright (and slipped some trademark in there, too, I see).
:)
:)
This may sound like a technicality -- but:
Parody may be but is not necessarily fair use. I mentioned earlier Campbell v. Acuff-Ross, a Supreme Court case which held a parody rap version of "Oh Pretty Woman" might be fair use, and remanded for the final determination.
For example, you might do a great parody of "Feelings" but if it borrows too much material or deprives the copyright holder of income by substitution or teh like, then it would not be fair use.
All of this is way to detailed for present purposes. But isn't it interesting?
*
Oh hey, this is post #1000. I have definitely been here too much.
Websites parody YOU!
I'm still learning about parody, and it's kind of hard to do from the web because, or course, everyone has slightly different interpretation, most of them wrong. (not you!) Almost everyone gets something wrong, certainly including me.
:)
Your comments on resemblance remind me of an insight I finally had into the interaction between parody and fair use. Copyright protects the original work and derivative works. Parody is by definition a derivative work -- if it doesn't reference the original work, it makes no sense. So parody is an infringing derivative work unless it meets the factors set forth rather clearly in Acuff-Rose, which I linked elsewhere here.
As for resemblance, you look how much is "borrowed" to make that parody connection, in both quantity and quality. So however much you alter or disguise images or text might not protect you. In Acuff-Rose the guitar riff itself struck at the essence of the song. The quantity and quality of the copying are equally important.
There are of course further requirements -- I commend the opinion to anyone's reading. The Kennedy concurrence is also interesting. Something most people get wrong about the decision is that it did not actually say that the Pretty Woman derivative was fair use; rather it remanded for more evidence to be collected. I don't know what happened then, except the parties probably settled.
I don't see how your site could be mistaken for theirs, but it is still a derivative work that could violate copyright. I think they just want your site to go away, and will grasp at whatever will make you do it.
Don't forget to call the press! These officials are elected, right?
P.S. As mentioned by others, this isn't legal advice, just background. If you need a lawyer get a lawyer.
actually, this defense has worked before in these sort of cases. It is kinda hard to prove, but it has worked..about 3 years ago, with a kid who made a website that made fun of his school (and was made to look like it) and when the school tired to shut it down, he took them to court. However, since the 1st amendement is open to interpretaion....it might not work in your case.
It's amazing how many people lately seem to be consulting Slashdot for qualified legal advice.
I hope that you realize submitting your own site to Slashdot will be more effective in bringing it down than an infinite number of lawyers in an infinite number of courts in an infinite number of years could ever hope to do.
Hmm... think I'll post a question to Slashdot: "What is users' experience using online forums for obtaining legal advice? Is the wild speculation of random, ill-educated, bug-eyed computer junkies a valid substitute for a consultation with an attorney? And most importantly, is Slashdot considered 'permissible evidence' in court?"
Give me my freedom, and I'll take care of my own security, thank you.