Sometimes you go looking for the story and sometimes, when you’re lucky, the story comes to you.

My breaking news item earlier on J.D. Salinger’s court victory today received a welcome visit from Andrei Mincov, a Law PhD with 13 years of experience as an intellectual property lawyer in Russia. Now studying law in Vancouver, Mincov leveraged his international perspective in a recent “100-page comparative research paper on the treatment of parody in the copyright laws of common law countries and selected European countries”.

He was kind enough to post a link to his article on the Salinger case “Why Courts Should Not Allow the Parody Exception to Make a Parody of the Copyright Law”, and we welcome the opportunity to give it a more prominent introduction. A taste:

With today’s attempts of the activists of the so-called “fair copyright” movement to use parody as a flagman ship to break the ice of protection that copyright laws afford, parodists seem to be in a win-win situation. If the author of the original work does not sue them, then they are left to parasite from the fame of the original work. If they do get sued, then the activists will make sure that the parodist becomes widely known as a martyr standing up for the rights of creators of transformative works, if not simply famous as a writer²⁷. If the parodist successfully defends the case, they will be able to sell many additional copies of the parody based on the fame attracted by the lawsuit. Even if the parodist loses the case and the distribution of the parody is enjoined, the newly acquired fame generated by the lawsuit will allow the parodist to sell whatever he or she writes next in their new status of celebrity.

Read the whole article here.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 1st, 2009 at 8:53 pm and is filed under *William's Posts, News, The Salinger Case. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.