Re: family guy episode

Alex Clark wrote:
mewthree wrote:
in this episode "Peter Griffin"writes a book called "Harry potter
and the half black chick". Don't know about you but i think they
are in breach of some copy write and dosen't sound like a PC correct
tittle.

The name "Harry Potter" cannot protected by copyright. It's just a
name, and a fair number of people in real life have that name. Titles
in the form "Harry Potter and the . . ." may be protected by
trademark, but I doubt that they could be protected by copyright.
What is protected by copyright is the specific and distinctive
content of the book, such as sentences (at least the longest and most
distinctive ones), paragraphs, etc. Extracts from the
copyright-protected content can still be quoted with sufficient
acknowledgement, but may not be reused as if they were someone else's
work. But even if the format of the titles could be copyrighted,
parody tends to be allowed (in the US, home of The Family Guy) as
"fair use".

As for protection by trademark, that means that someone who doesn't
own the mark can't use the mark to disguise their work as part of a
line of products that goes with the mark. It doesn't mean that you
can't refer to it in a joke.

Please don't be too quick to assume that such things are prohibited by
law. Modern intellectual property laws are bad enough without anyone
making up additional restrictions beyond those actually in effect.

Yeap definitely *not* copyright infringement. You'll need to use a quite big
chunk of the book for that. Slander maybe, if it wasn't an obvious parody.


.

Relevant Pages

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