Purple craze
FOR A TYRANNOSAURUS REX, Barney has remarkably thin skin. And, as with so many celebrities, Barney’s lawyers are all too eager to shield his purple flesh from the sting of criticism.
Barney, for those of you with no exposure to public TV in the morning, is the annoyingly giddy star of a popular children’s program. Although millions of children revere him, his ubiquity and sappiness have earned many adults’ scorn. One of the latter is Stuart Frankel of New York, a musicologist who devoted one corner of his website to a page likening Barney to, well, Satan.
He’s not unique in holding that opinion; a Google search turns up 1,400 references to “Barney is evil.” But, because he put two copyrighted pictures of the plum-colored dinosaur on his site -- one doctored with horns, red eyes, bloody teeth and a pentagram on its chest -- he received an e-mail in 2002 from the law firm representing Lyons Partnership, Barney’s owners, demanding that the pictures come down.
Frankel refused, leading to more lawyerly nastygrams. After the fourth one arrived in June 2006, the Electronic Frontier Foundation filed suit in federal court in New York asking for a declaration that Frankel’s parody of Barney was protected by law.
The foundation is right. Lyons, which has sent threatening letters and e-mails to numerous parody sites over the years, seems to think that copyrights trump the 1st Amendment.
Sadly, there are plenty of other copyright and trademark holders who have behaved the same way, using threats of legal action to squelch the fair use of images and brand names online. Federal law also gives them a great deal of leverage over Internet service providers. If they tell an ISP that a website is violating their copyrights, the ISP has to block the site or risk losing its protection against a lawsuit.
The public not only has an interest in discussing cultural icons such as Barney on noncommercial websites like Frankel’s, it has the right to parody them -- even by scribbling fangs and pentagrams on copyrighted images. Courts need to send a message to companies such as Lyons that copyrights and trademarks aren’t tools for silencing critics.
