I'm on the side of Kevin Ryan: I just don't see the harm in creating parodies and tributes. Copywrong police strike again.
Tangled up in Seuss | Salon News
Ryan, a 33-year-old Houston music producer and author, went into his home studio and engineered a sort of retro mash-up of two of his favorite artists, Bob Dylan and Dr. Seuss.
Ryan took the text from seven Seuss classics, including “The Cat in the Hat” and “Green Eggs and Ham,” and set them to original tunes that sounded like they were right off Dylan's mid-'60s releases. He played all the instruments and sang all the songs in Dylan's breathy, nasal twang. He registered a domain name, dylanhearsawho.com, and in February posted his seven tracks online, accompanied by suitably Photoshopped album artwork, under the title “Dylan Hears a Who.”“Green Eggs and Ham” was set to a tune and arrangement somewhere between “Highway 61 Revisited” and “Subterranean Homesick Blues,” complete with Dylan's rushed, occasionally sneering phrasing. Familiar passages are run together in impatient run-ons:
Would you eat them in a box?
Would you eat them with a fox?
Not in a box not with a fox
Not in a house not with a mouse
I would not eat them here or there
I would not eat them anywhereAll this accompanied by an up-tempo electric band, complete with the jaunty skirling of a Hammond organ.
It was clever and delightful. Ryan had immersed himself so fully in Seuss' words and Dylan's style that he managed to merge two quite different creative intelligences. Many who have heard the tracks come away convinced they're really listening to Bob Dylan.
well, I wouldn't go that far. Does sound similar though, and the Hammond organ is a deft touch. Needed to add some Mike Bloomfield guitar riffs too.
Boing Boing noticed Kevin Ryan's work, and suddenly, so did a lot of people, including Dr. Seuss Enterprises.
Only two weeks after word of the site began spreading, Ryan got a cease-and-desist demand from the Seuss lawyers, who said the site and songs infringed the company's copyrights and trademarks. Ryan complied quickly and quietly. Instead of the Dylan/Seuss tracks, visitors to dylanhearsawho.com find a brief message saying the site has been “retired” at the request of Dr. Seuss Enterprises.If you were caught up in the momentary wonder of how someone could execute such an ingeniously perfect blending of period musical style, '60s attitude and loopy storytelling, it was tempting to see all of this as just another case of a heavy-handed corporate copyright holder -- a master of copyright war, to call on the old Dylan oeuvre -- sticking it to the little guy.
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However, whether a work is “transformative” in going beyond an original with “new expression, meaning, or message,” is just one of the factors courts must consider when assessing fair use. Judges must also weigh whether a new work is created for profit; whether the original work merits protection from copying; how much of the original was appropriated to make a new work; and what market impact the appropriation might have on the original work.
In Rothman's opinion, Ryan's work flunks two essential tests.
First, it fails to be a transformative work in that there's no clear comment on or criticism of the Seuss original. “I think he's not even close to the line on this. He's far in the infringing camp,” Rothman said.
Second, “Dylan Hears a Who” appropriates too much of the original material. “It takes the entire Dr. Seuss material; it's not like taking just a few lines to make a point,” Rothman said. “One question a court would ask is, Did the defendant take more than was necessary for a parody? and here I think the answer is clearly yes.” The one factor that might weigh in Ryan's favor, Rothman said, is that “Dylan Hears a Who” did not appear to be commercial.
100 years from now, if the human race is still around, copyright thugs will have cordoned off every possible variation of creative freedom, and we will only be left with remakes of Disney movies and Brittany Spears clones.
