- Can you copyright a joke?
It's always been a pretty gray area, but don't tell that to Jay Leno and Rita Rudner who have settled a federal copyright lawsuit against author Judy Brown and several book publishers. The comedians sued Brown in 2006, claiming that she reproduced their jokes, many of which were told on "The Tonight Show," without permission. Brown has collected and repackaged thousands of jokes by various comedians. The settlement also includes monetary compensation, which Leno, Rudner and NBC Studios will donate to charity. "I thought it was important to make it clear that jokes are protected like any other art form," Leno said. Well yeah, but the truth is jokes can be a slippery area for copyright protection. They're typically too short and their origins too vague for any serious litigation to hold up (imagine tracking down the origins of all the stuff floating around on the Internet). Robert Cumbow, who heads Graham & Dunn's Intellectual Property practice, says that the copyright wouldn't cover the funny idea embodied in a given joke, but perhaps the way a joke is told. "For what it's worth," Cumbow noted in a post, "I compiled and published a collection of jokes some years ago, and encountered no copyright problems."
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| 01:24 PM Jan 24, 2008 | Email the Daily Dragon | Email this Article | Post Comments |
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