Cultural Impact on Copyright Exceptions: Parody in Germany and Japan
Christoph Rademacher · Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2021
The battleground between copyright protection and parody exceptions is not new. The US Supreme Court tested the fair use framework provided for under US copyright law in its well-known 1994 decision regarding a parody of Roy Orbison’s title song to the blockbuster movie Pretty Woman ; arguably, no other single court decision had a similar impact on the copyright law treatment of parodies both in the US and internationally. The notion that the use of copyright-protected content in a parody should be generally permissible under copyright law has gained widespread traction across most jurisdictions. At the same time, the question of what exactly constitutes a parody varies from country to country and from culture to culture. This chapter provides an overview of the development of copyright exceptions related to parody under German and Japanese law, and highlights how a different tradition of parody can result in different copyright law interpretation.