JibJab Threatened Over Use Of Woody Guthrie Song
from the hello,-lawyer,-let-me-explain-satire-to-you... dept
For the last few weeks, the JibJab site and their amusing political parody of Woody Guthrie's "This Land Is Your Land" has been getting passed around the net. It's well done, and deserves much of the praise it's been getting. However, it appears the folks who own the rights to Woody Guthrie's music are anything but pleased, and are demanding that JibJab stop distributing the flash movie. Their biggest complaint seems to be that "This puts a completely different spin on the song," which will "damage" the song. Anyone who can't see how utterly ridiculous this is has no job watching over Woody Guthrie's music. Guthrie, after all, is the same singer who once put the following copyright notice on his work: "This song is Copyrighted in U.S., under Seal of Copyright # 154085, for a period of 28 years, and anybody caught singin it without our permission, will be mighty good friends of ourn, cause we don't give a dern. Publish it. Write it. Sing it. Swing to it. Yodel it. We wrote it, that's all we wanted to do." Apparently, no one told the folks at the humorless Richmond Organization.
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Parody
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I hope so
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A dangerous admission by the owners!
My first reaction, alas, would be that this is impermissible satire and non-parody. But apparently, the owners disagree when they claim "This puts a completely different spin on the song," which will "damage" the song. If that is their position, then they lose. Either the work puts a spin on the song, in which case it *IS* protectible parody, or it does not. Their best argument here on copyright grounds, at least, would be that the song is NOT a parody, but rather a non-transformative borrowing of the familiar tune to sell a commentary to someone else.
The "spin on" issue is a direct take from the Luther Campbell case over "O Pretty Woman." No matter how ugly the spin (and 2 Live Crew's spin was an ugly one), that is protected and fair use. It is only when you are not spinning, but stealing (in the strict dictionary sense) from the work to comment on something ELSE (like the "Cat Not in the Hat" satire of the OJ trial) that you can sue.
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Coincidence?
Hmmm...
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This land
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