Public Views on the Role of Parody in Copyright Law

2022 Fiscal Year Final Research Report

• Project/Area Number: 18KK0356
• Research Category: Fund for the Promotion of Joint International Research (Fostering Joint International Research (A))
• Allocation Type: Multi-year Fund
• Review Section: Basic Section 05070:New fields of law-related
• Research Institution: Hokkaido University
• Principal Investigator: Hazucha Branislav 北海道大学, 法学研究科, 教授 (30452808)
• Project Period (FY): 2019 – 2022
• Keywords: copyright / derivative work / wrongfulness / transformative use / parody / satire / survey / social norms

Outline of Final Research Achievements

The research results show that the general public recognizes not only the wrongfulness of literary copying, but also of producing derivative works without obtaining a licence or any other permission from the concerned rightholder. The results also demonstrate that the public’s assessment of the transformative copyright uses depends upon several factors, such as humorousness, caused harm and gained wrongful profit. The public thus perceives humorous transformative uses of copyrighted works as less wrongful than non-humorous ones, but deems causing any harm to the authors as wrongful even when such copyright uses are parodic.
At the same time, people living in diverse cultural, social and legal environments and traditions deem enforcement measures, such as online content removal and demonetization, as appropriate under certain conditions, but they do not consider that any profit obtained by using another person’s copyrighted work is automatically wrongfully gained.

Free Research Field

新領域法学関連

Academic Significance and Societal Importance of the Research Achievements

As the research results demonstrate when the public perceives the wrongfulness of producing derivative works, including parody, in the form of user-generated works without obtaining any licence from the concerned copyright holders, they are vital in improving the efficiency of copyright enforcement.