Originally published in Current, Sept. 11, 2006
By Karen Everhart
Is Barney fair game for online parodies by adults who love to hate him? A lawsuit filed in a New York federal court last month contends that he is. It says lawyers for Barney’s owners should stop threatening Stuart Frankel, publisher of a web page that makes evil fun of PBS’s big purple dinosaur.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation and the firm Akin Gump Strauss filed the suit on behalf of Frankel, who since 2002 has received a series of saber-rattling e-mails and letters from a lawyer representing the Lyons Partnership, owners of trademarks to the Barney character. The communiqués declare that Frankel's website violates copyright laws and threaten to demand that his Internet service provider remove it from the Web.
Frankel’s site (dustyfeet.com) is a relic of the Web’s early years when Barney-bashing was in vogue. One link, labeled “evil,” takes visitors to a page claiming that the children’s TV character “drains the life forces from the unwary” and is “primarily concerned with selling itself.” The site presents an image of Barney as a demon.
The complaint, filed Aug. 23 [2006] in the U.S. District Court in New York, argues that noncommercial parody of Barney is fair use of the character’s image.
“The misuse of intimidating cease-and-desist letters for censorship is a growing problem online,” said Corynne McSherry, staff attorney for EFF, a nonprofit defender of individual rights online.
“We regularly monitor the Web and search for our characters’ names to make sure our brands aren’t associated with violence or sexually suggestive messages,” says Danielle Web, spokeswoman for Barney’s keepers, Hit Entertainment and Lyons. They want to protect his young fans from inappropriate and upsetting images, she says.
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posted Sept. 12, 2006
Copyright 2006 by Current Publishing Committee
