TVSquad

Poor Stuart Frankel. He set-up a website satirizing friendly purple dinosaur Barney, and all he got was grief - grief in the form of intimidating letters from Barney's copyright holders, the Lyons Partnership. Lyons threatened to file a lawsuit if doctored images of said dinosaur were not promptly removed from Frankel's site. Fortunately for satirists everywhere, Frankel fought back. An out-of-court settlement has been reached. Lyons must cease all threats against Frankel and pay him $5,000.00 for his trouble.

The parody in question depicted Barney's off-stage persona -- the evil, punky one (pictured). Under the legal doctrine of fair use, anyone can use copyrighted work in a parody so long as it's for "noncommercial purposes, limited to conjuring up the subject of the satire and does not replace the market for the original." So, go to town, people. Mock away. Kick a dinosaur while he's down. Think Barney parodies have been done to death? There's a world of saccharine children's programming just waiting for your comedic intervention.

Ren and Stimpy creator John Kricfalusi is not happy with YouTube. The Spumco founder has been using his blog as a kind of "online classroom" to discuss the history of animation, as well as techniques and craft that were a major part of the "Golden Age" of animation. As a visual aid, he's been posting a lot of clips from YouTube of old Warner Bros. cartoons, but recently received an e-mail from YouTube telling him many of those clips have been taken down due to copyright infringement.

Now, I don't know enough about copyright law to take any definite stance on this, but Kricfalusi's assessment is that he's actually helping to promote these cartoons, and that people who see the crappy versions on YouTube will want to go out and actually purchase the higher quality DVDs. He writes: "While Warner Bros. stops promoting their own great properties by taking the cartoons off of the TV networks, the only way left for young fans to discover these classic films is through YouTube and our fan blogs."