Cindy Cohn, the EFF's legal director, is fed up with Barney the Purple Dinosaur. His corporate masters are sending nasty lawyer-letters to anyone who hosts a site that lampoons the repetitive Rex, despite the clear exemption in copyright law for parodical uses. Cindy sent BarneyCorp a letter last year telling them to give up their protection racket, but they haven't learned, and so now Cindy's getting ready to take 'em to court for harassing their detractors with misleading legal threats.
"As they were when you threatened the EFF directly, your claims are baseless and a misuse of your copyrights," she wrote. "We once again urge you to cease threatening noncommercial hosts of parodical material.
"Should you continue, or should you carry out your threat to send this baseless threat to Dr. Frankel's ISP, we will investigate bringing affirmative claims against you," she also wrote.
In an interview with Newsbytes, Cohn said Frankel received "essentially the same letter" that the EFF had received from Barney's protectors last summer.
"What that told me was that the Barney guys didn't get it," Cohn said. "They still didn't understand about parody, in spite of the fact that I had laid out for them what the Supreme Court has said about parody and why it's protected expression. They were still going around trying to scare people, claiming that any use of Barney's image required a license from them. That's just not the law."