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Comment by Forgeties79 | Hacker News Reader

This is an often repeated statement online (like “fiduciary duty”) that way over emphasizes the risk. Parody media poses absolutely no risk to their trademark, not even a tiny bit of incremental “damage.”

Companies don’t need to be bulliest the vast majority of the time they act like one. We need to stop parroting this excuse for them.

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IANAL but I heard the creators of Robot Chicken (an animation show that parodies many big franchises) that they have to be very careful to make sure they can claim what they do is parody. As I understood, and to my best recollection, they cannot just use e.g., Batman in an original funny context… they need to actually comment on Batman (existing storylines, characters, tropes, cliches, mythology) in their sketch. That said, we know that some IP lawyers will just send a Cease & Desist because it costs them nothing, it’s more defensible, and they don’t risk any penalties.

A bit of a tangent to Weird Al, who often is said to not need the permission of the original artist because his songs are parodies, usually isn't commenting on the actual content of the original song but instead takes the lyrics and gives them a different theme. 'Smells like Nirvana' is one of the few songs he does that actually does directly parody the original. His videos are far more parody than the songs themselves. Makes me wonder where the legal line actually is drawn and if asking permission is actually because it would be too risky not to.

(Not sure if you were saying this in your comment) I read somewhere that Weird Al always asks permission before releasing a parody song.

IIRC, the same article/post also said that some other prominent parody artists (Stan Freberg might have been an example) generally did not.

There's a pretty famous story about Weird Al's Amish Paradise and Coolio. Weird Al got permission from the recording company and producer, but not Coolio. Coolio was not amused, initially.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amish_Paradise#Coolio's_respon...

My understanding is that a parody has to actually parody the original work. There's a distinction between "parodying" and "using the songwriting with different lyrics". You see a lot of people doing riffs on "What a Wonderful World" and getting shut down by the Louis Armstrong estate, e.g.

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