EFF Sues Barney Producers over Spoof Sites

PetManimal writes "The Electronic Frontier Foundation is suing the company that produces 'Barney and Friends' for harassing the creator of a Barney parody Web site. Barney producers Lyons Partnership has threatened lawsuits over the past few years against Stuart Frankel and his parody site, actions which the EFF says violates freedom of speech and fair use laws. The parody site contains doctored images of Barney, and claims the purple dinosaur is the Antichrist. From the article: 'Lyons Partnership has sent multiple cease-and-desist letters to Frankel for a Web page that includes a depiction of the fuzzy purple dinosaur as Satan. In an October letter, Lyons demands that Frankel immediately take down copyrighted images of Barney. The company threatens to take legal action or contact Frankel's Internet service provider if he doesn't comply.'"

Comments

Revised Re:The address

[AlgoRhythm]

That's the original site, the current is here for the intro, and here for the current saga.

Stuart may relate this on his page (it's been a while since I read it), but from talking to him it basically has escalated, and they chose to sue, because despite an order to only contact him through his lawyers at the EFF, Barney's folks have continued to mail him nastygrams directly.

The site in question

[SirClicksalot]

Couldn't find it in the linked article, found it on EFF page:
original site
site after complaint

Re:Barney's got a brand new bag

[Pharmboy]

What pisses me off is /. didn't link to the site, and the article didn't link to it either. Either they are all afraid of getting sued, or they don't want me to SEE the actual site and make up my own mind whether the site is "parody" (fair use), "satire" (not fair use) or something else.

I did finally find it at this address and did a whois to make sure the domain is owned by Stuart Frankel. Not much here except some dead links (other threatened sites?) and what appears to be Fair Use to me, but IANAL.