Expert: Adlai Jehosephat - 4/4/2006

Question
I'm doing a report on copyrights for a songwriting class and was wondering how Weird Al does parodies of famous songs without it being a violation of copyrighted music.  

Answer
The short answer is that he always gets permission from the original artists, and there are some royalties involved. For a longer answer, the Ask Al Archive at www.weirdal.com/aaarchive.htm is a wealth of information about Weird Al Yankovic. Here are some examples that may be relevant to your report:

Aaron Husk of Fayette, Alabama asks: Is there any permission you need for your polka medleys like for your parodies?

Yes and no. In principle I don't need permission, but if I paid everybody their full royalty rate for songs in the medley, I would wind up LOSING money on each album! So each and every songwriter needs to agree to only take their rightful share of the royalties (meaning, if a Green Day song takes up 11% of the medley, then Green Day will only get 11% of the songwriting royalties for that one song). We can't make exceptions because it's a "favored nations" deal, meaning that if one person gets the full amount, EVERYBODY gets the full amount. Obviously, a whole lot of artists have been good sports about this - but it's a mountain of paperwork every time I do a medley.

Tim Montgomery of Decatur/Il asks: Why wasn't "Girls Just Wanna Have Lunch" on the Food Album?

There is a "royalty ceiling" on parodies for each album (meaning there are only so many parodies I can put on each album before it starts eating into my own profits), and I needed to eliminate a song from the list, so I chose "Girls Just Wanna Have Lunch."

Mike Schooley of T-Ville Ut asks: do you have to ask permission to do style parodies?

Well, as I always say, we live in a country where anybody can sue anybody else for any reason at any time, so it's always a gray area. However, even though I always get permission for the parodies, I don't feel obligated to do the same for "sound-alikes."

Troydan Glomk of Clearlake, CA asks: Do you need artists' permission to mock their videos on AL-TV and AlMusic? (i.e. "Brilliant Disguise," "Don't Cry," "Ironic" etc.)

Welllllll, technically, probably yes... but I never bother on those specials because otherwise it would take me forever to get all the clearances - and forgiveness is a lot easier to get than permission. I can't believe how much I get away with on those shows (especially on Much Music)! Mostly I just cross my fingers and hope that everyone has a good sense of humor about it. I'm very careful about permissions on my albums, but for a cable special - well, if anybody gets really upset, we'll just edit their part out the next time it airs.

Thanks for your question!