Weird Al's new album?

[Garfield226]

From the FAQ on weirdal.com:

Does Al get permission to do his parodies?

Al does get permission from the original writers of the songs that he parodies. While the law supports his ability to parody without permission, he feels it’s important to maintain the relationships that he’s built with artists and writers over the years. Plus, Al wants to make sure that he gets his songwriter credit (as writer of new lyrics) as well as his rightful share of the royalties.

…

Have any artists ever turned Al down for a parody?

Even though most recording artists really do have a pretty good sense of humor, on a few very rare occasions Al has been denied permission to do a parody. Actually, the only artist to turn Al down consistently over the years has been the Artist Formerly Known As The Artist Formerly Known As Prince. Go figure.

Why wasn’t there a music video for Poodle Hat?

Al was actually planning to do a video for “Couch Potato” (his parody of Eminem’s “Lose Yourself”). But unfortunately, even though Eminem was okay with Al having the parody on his album, for some strange reason he denied permission for Al to make a music video for the song. Since Al was already in pre-production on the video and also had to put together his AL-TV special and gear up for a 3-month concert tour, he didn’t have the time to switch gears and do a video for a different song. Al did put together a couple of makeshift videos for AL-TV (including one for the song “Bob” which was a dead-on parody of Dylan’s “Subterranean Homesick Blues” from the Don’t Look Back documentary), but those were low-budget quickies that were intended to be exclusive to the VH1 special.

[Tuckerfan]

@want2know

I was under the impression that you don’t need permission to parody a song as long as: 1) The original song has already been recorded, and 2) You pay the appropriate royalties to the songwriter/publishing company/anyone else with their hand out. Doesn’t this fall under the same category as recording a cover version? And isn’t parody/satire protected under the 1st Amendment?

That doesn’t mean you still can’t get sued, though. That Barbie song (“I’m a Barbie girl, I live in a Barbie world”) enraged the folks at Mattel so that they sued over it (and lost). Then there’s the case of the Battle Tanks commercials which were clearly parodies of the Snuggle Bear fabric softener ads, as hard as it is to believe, the folks that did the Battle Tanks ads lost their court cases when the makers of Snuggle sued them.

Al’s a smart guy, so he wants to avoid any unnecessary headaches.

[Derleth]

Of course, in this country nothing you do or abstain from doing is certain to prevent someone from suing you. The only variable is how successful they are.

That said, Weird Al is being more careful than he strictly needs to be, but he’s being that careful for some pretty good reasons.