[bombcar]

Parody for money is protected BUT you have to be parodying the thing iirc.

So Weird Al could have made all his songs without permission (but he gets it to be polite) - though he’d still have to pay licensing to use the music iirc.

There’s case law about it. Barbie Girl may be involved. Snoopy vs the Red Baron also.

[yamtaddle]

There's a nerd-famous one involving Penny Arcade using (IIRC) Strawberry Shortcake to parody the style of American McGee's Alice. I think PA ended up caving because it was too hard to defend the use of a character from one owner to parody something about another property entirely. The strip was definitely intended as parody, but including elements from something that wasn't the subject of the parody made it much harder to defend under that exception.

[bombcar]

Yep, the famous banned PA comic (you can still find it, of course).

But this response comic was parody of the subject matter, so it is fine: https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2003/04/28/read-it-before...

[georgeecollins]

Maybe. Both cases you mention are songs, not video games. From a modern perspective you would think the laws about intellectual property for video games would be the same as for film and music. I think the long run that will be true. But some of the early precedent has treated video games more like "toys" with less speech protection.

If you are really doing this check with a lawyer who works in the area (admittedly few).

[bombcar]

Yeah, and this one is a bit more spicy because the whole point is that you're in a horror IKEA and so the fact that it's clearly an IKEA is part of the "sale value" of the game.

Compare to Carl & Phil: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VRJEN1pvZ60 - that's clearly a Costco/Sam's Club parody (and they also have FedUPS as a delivery company) but it's not being used to "sell".

It's very complicated and involves trademark AND copyright law, so it could go either way.

Also see Sosumi and BHA ;)