I always thought that was kind of nice - that they liked being parodied because it meant they were legit.
"I told [Kurt] I want to do a parody of 'Smells Like Teen Spirit,' and his first thing was: 'Is it going to be about food?' and I said, 'no, it's going to be about how no one can understand your lyrics.'"
Cobain thought the concept was funny and signed off on it."
https://www.howardstern.com/show/2016/5/17/weird-al-mandator...
(Maybe he'll show up here and tell us! :) )
Weird Al is great.
He became a vegetarian in 1992 (https://www.weirdal.com/archives/faq/, search for "vegetarian").
I don't know when the song was written, but he was playing it as early as 1992 (https://www.setlist.fm/stats/songs/weird-al-yankovic-2bd6cca...).
As I understand it, he does also seek permission of the original artist, who isn’t always the owner of the copyright, as a professional courtesy.
That's not what the ruling you refer to says, and it's not what the statute says. The ruling's text is at https://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/92-1292.ZS.html and mentions nothing along the lines of "minimum". The Supreme Court held in that particular case that the portion of the lyrics copied was not excessive, and left it up to the lower court to decide whether repeating the bass riff was excessive.
The statute's general guidelines are that all four of the following factors must be taken into account when determining fair use:
(1) the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;
(2) the nature of the copyrighted work;
(3) the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and
(4) the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.
Factor (3) is the only one that deals with how much of the source material can be used, and it also does not support your assertion. And those rules aren't just for parodies.
You can just play the actual song the other person wrote. You’ve heard of the concept of covers right?
I don’t need anyone’s permission to record my own version of any song, and I can change the words or otherwise rearrange it however I want.
I might owe them publishing royalties but that’s an entirely different conversation.
The article implies it’s a grey area but that’s not actually true, it’s not really borderline at all, at least not for creating the songs. Al could have completely ignored the artists opinion he just chose not to.
With that said, the issue of a sync license could be a little more complex, and maybe is what the article is referring to. That could have some impact on the ability to create videos, though that would generally seem to hold up well to a fair use defense.
You can't change the words - doing so makes your cover a derivative work, and not covered by the usual compulsory licence. You can change the arrangement