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"Anti-Gay" My Hetero Ass
Here's that letter again for reference:
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Thu, 3 Sep 1998 (Ezekiel Krahlin) |
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Hello, great stuff, your parody of Family Circus. I am presently being
challenged by Charles Schulz's lawyers, for doing a gay parody on
Peanuts. Perhaps you can lend some insight, to help me with my case?
One thing I'd like to know is: do you parody Family Circus without
their specific approval? I would think you don't have to...however,
perhaps you chose to anyway.
Rather than exhaust you with a lengthy message...you can acquaint yourself with my Peanuts issue, by going to the following web page: http://www.2xtreme.net/jwd/k6/copyrite/schulz.htm or its mirror: http://members.xoom.com/ezekielk/extra/copyrite.htm There, you will see the image in question, as well as daily updates of all relevent information on this matter. Thanks for listening! |
If you're going to make a statement like that, and you've going to have it mirrored somewhere, and you're going to go through the trouble of legally defending it...shouldn't it be a good parody? Shouldn't you make it humorous? Or interesting? Or at least have a point about being a parody in the first place? That statement could just have easily been made with stick figures with no particular name.
In fact, here. I spent ten minutes scribbling this out in Photoshop:
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(Zeke's comment added here): The original file name for SpinnWebe's rendering on your left, was "knocknuts.gif". Shows you just how anti-homo-biased he already was in the first place. Typical snake-in-the-grass het-ro-set-choo-ul. |
It's functionally the same, except for two things:
- It's not a Peanuts parody, which means it's a little harder to figure out who "Charles Schitz" is. But not by much.
- I ditched the "sunday" part. Because you really wanted to say all comics, right? In fact, I'm almost surprised it's limited to comics, really.
This thing is a parody of a parody. The original was by Charles Schulz.
That thing you have there, I mean...it's just not worth defending. I was going to say it's not even parody, but it does fit your definition #5. Why not just switch the words to some other comic United doesn't run? The text have nothing to do with the strip they're in; the comic I drew up there shows they're interchangeable. Maybe that could be your defense: it just sucks as a parody.
For bonus points, the Fair Use Act does not protect parody in general. I'd look into that before you fight it.
Although I wonder if the lawyers went that way because it's just easier than going after what should bother them more: slander. Charles Schulz is "anti-gay"? (And why does "anti-gay" sound like something a 4th-grader would say?) What, all Sunday comics should have gay rights messages in them or they're "anti-gay"? Should we draw up a list of mandatory topics each comic must have, now? I haven't seen any Internet professionals in Peanuts yet; should I be up in arms? With that logic, is Charles Schulz also anti-Latvian? Anti-masturbation? Anti-Bauhaus? Anti-ZDNet?
Ah, but nevermind. I already got mail from people who tell me you're beyond logic, anyway.
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