| Title | New Laws Make Parody Easier in UK | |
| Date | Wednesday October 01 2014, @05:31PM | |
| Author | LaminatorX | |
| Topic | ||
| from the Gov.-Actually dept. | ||
BBC reports:
Under current rules, there has been a risk of being sued for breach of copyright if clips of films, TV shows or songs were used without consent.
But the new European Copyright Directive will allow the use of the material so long as it is fair and does not compete with the original version.
The new law will come into effect on 1 October.
Owners of the copyrighted works will only be able to sue if the parody conveys a discriminatory message.
Comedy writer Graham Linehan, who was behind TV shows such as The IT Crowd, Father Ted and Black Books, agreed the rules had been "quite restrictive" in his experience.
"Artists need to be protected, but recently there's been an automated quality to some of the legal challenges. You might do something and you know full well the author of the original work will love the thing your doing and see it as a tribute or friendly nod, but the lawyers - they don't see any of that, they just see something they have to act on.
There seems to be a catch, but I don't know how this catch kicks in:
It would then be down to a judge to decide if the parody is funny.
While parody works by allusive or ironical imitation of other cultural manifestations, does it need to be always funny?
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printed from SoylentNews, New Laws Make Parody Easier in UK on 2024-04-20 01:53:19