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Seuss sues
I don’t know if people are still visiting this blog, but if you are, here’s an interesting copyright controversy:
Apparently Dr. Seuss Enterprises is suing a Houston based musician for setting seven Dr. Seuss classics to Bob Dylan-style music.
The article quotes law professor Jennifer Rothman, who suggests this musician's work is probably not protected as “transformative use” because it doesn’t comment on or criticize the original work in the way that, for instance, 2 Live Crew's “Pretty Woman” did. (Rothman also notes another w/ Ryan’s fair use defense is that he uses the entire material)
Rothman’s analysis strikes me as correct. But it does seem sort of odd that critical or parodic responses to a work are protected but other creative re-interpretations are not. As the author of this article points out, presenting Dr. Seuss’s material in this manner does provide a new perspective on it: “By inserting Dr. Seuss' words into a novel context, specifically, the voice and style of a radical 1960s troubadour, the "Dylan Hears a Who" project comments on the original work by exposing a sly, rebellious, countercultural dimension to his work that has remained hidden. At the same time, it exposes a playful though pointed creative intelligence shared by two of the most important figures of the 1960s.”
The problem seems to be that the borrowing musician's perspective isn’t explicitly parodic. But why does it have to be? From a First Amendment perspective, it definitely makes sense to provide special protections to parody. But if copyright law aims to promote creativity, I’m not sure why the “transformative uses” it recognizes are limited to those that make comments of a critical, comic, or mocking nature. Why can Alanis Morrisette sing “My Humps,” but a Dylan-wannabe can’t sing the Cat-in-the-Hat, if they both creatively re-imagine the work? Indeed, maybe what is bothering me is that taking a children’s book and re-creating it as a 60’s style folk song (merging two “creative intelligences” as the article puts it) seems like a much more radical, inventive transformation than a mere parody of another song.
I think what also gets me about this situation is that Dr. Seuss isn’t even around any more. The author is not being incentivized to create by this protection, and someone else’s creativity is seriously hindered. I guess this is the same old argument for limiting copyright protection to the life of the author, but it does make you wonder how society benefits from having the potential for this kind of responsive creativity locked up for so long.
Posted by at April 13, 2007 6:43 PM
in Current Events
