Parody and Copyright

ECJ EC-201/13

The European Court of Justice had to decide when the use of someone else's work is a parody and therefore exempted from the work's copyright protection. Such parody would not constitute an infringement of intellectual property rights.

The Court held that the concept of parody is an autonomous concept of EU law and must be interpreted uniformly within the EU. A parody must a) evoke existing work whilst being noticeably different from it and b) constitute an expression of humour or mockery.

The exemption of the parody from copyright protection would not apply to parody containing a discriminatory message. In that case the rights holder in the original work would have in principle a legitimate interest in ensuring that the work is not associated with such a message.