Just Travesties: TV Parodies of Hollywood Films and Copyright Infringement Lawsuits

This essay investigates Loew’s Inc. v. Columbia Broadcasting System and Columbia Pictures v. National Broadcasting Company, two copyright infringement lawsuits that Hollywood film studios brought against television production companies for parodies of their work that were symptomatic of the fraught relationship between the two industries in the early and mid-1950s. I show how competing theories of copyright, the particular form of sponsorship of American commercial television, and a lack of attention to the specific ways that film and television can generate parody shaped these early decisions and still, to a certain extent, haunt parody-as-fair-use jurisprudence.