Stumbled upon this article posted by a friend on Facebook. The article is by Eriq Gardner and presented on hollywoodreporter.com:
Star Trek/Dr. Suess Mashup Deemed Copyright Fair Use by Judge
The book in question is Oh, The Places You’ll Boldly Go!, and the cover to the book looks like this:
Which is, of course, a parody of…
So the judge felt the Star Trek book was “fair use” and didn’t harm the Dr. Suess estate.
I… I don’t agree. Yes, Mad magazine exists for many years doing “fair use” parodies of pop culture icons…
And…
…and…
…and I totally get that being “fair use”. Mad magazine essentially exits (in large part) of parodying A LOT of cultural icons.
But the Oh, The Places You’ll Boldly Go! is not part of some series. It is a one off book that clearly makes use of Star Trek AND Dr. Suess to make its point of sale and I strongly suspect what’s inside the book also takes its point from Dr. Suess’ works (though, having not seen the whole thing, I don’t know).
I also strongly, STRONGLY suspect Paramount Pictures, the company that has the copyright to the Star Trek property, approved of/holds the copyright to this particular work and therefore “OK’ed” it for release.
Why, if that is the case, is the Dr. Suess estate considered not as important on OKing this?
I have to say, if someone used my stories/properties and created a one-off book that very clearly used my concepts to sell their work, I’d be plenty pissed at the judge who made that ruling.