Wednesday, November 22, 2006

As Seen on CNN

To celebrate the merger between Bank of America and MBNA, a zealous employee wrote a song praising the deal and the new company, to the tune of "One" by U2. Although the guy is a really good singer he's a little too earnest in his performance. The video got spread around the internet thanks to youtube and now it turns out Universal, which owns rights to the original recording is not too happy. I think the Poop's legal expert, The Concierge would say Universal doesn't have much of an infringement case here. The BofA version is parody, it's not a commercial enterprise and it's not likely to be confused with the original recording.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Not able to view this clip but The standard for copyright infringement is different than trademark infringement. The test for copyright infringement is "Substantial Similarity." There is a specific body of law regarding parody. Additionally, if a work is transformative of a copyrighted work there is no infringement.