Thursday, July 23, 2009

Censordyne and the Parody/Satire Exception

In case you haven't already noticed, the independent political campaigning group GetUp! have launched a TV ad against the Australian Governments plans for mandatory ISP level filtering of the Internet. They use the likness of the packaging for Sensodyne toothpaste and have called it Censordyne "good, clean, internet censorship".

SMH story here.

Apparently, GlaxoSmithKlein (owner of Sensodyne), is not a fan of GetUp's use of the likeness of the toothpaste brand. They are even thinking of legal action, as they weren't consulted about the use of the brand.

The first thing I think of is the parody and satire exception to copyright infringement in section 41A of the Copyright Act 1968. Basically, you can reproduce a substantial part of a work, and avoid infringement if:
* it is for the purpose of parody or satire; and
* it is a fair dealing

I suppose the question is, (and I couldn't find anything in the Explanatory Memorandum in the amending Act which introduced s41A):
Does the parody have to be a poking fun at the thing being reproduced? That is, does the exception only apply if GetUp were in fact poking fun at the toothpaste rather than something else like a Government policy?

If you remembered the anti-ads by the Footy Show, those were poking fun at the ads themselves, so it's an obvious parody. But if you are using a toothpaste brand to poke fun at policy, is that covered by the exception?

Then you have to consider the satire part of the exception. The Australian Copyright Council (fact sheet G083v03) makes a distinction between parody and satire, and regards the satire exception to be more strict in the sense that more elements have to be present before one can regard it as "satire".

Food for thought.

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