this post was submitted on 26 Jan 2024
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Where's the line? Were they parodying Carlin? Or just using his likeness? Can Fox News do this with Biden?
This is a far larger thing than just a comedy impersonation.
It's something the law isn't equipped to handle as written.
And fear of things for which no law can be ready imagined in their extremes is how I got my current attitude to everything legal.
About the event itself - well, I suppose Carlin himself would be amused by the fact.
Whether it's presented as real seems a reasonable line to me.
Fox News could not use it to mislead people into thinking Biden said something that he did not, but parody like "Sassy Justice" from the South Park creators (using a Trump deepfake) would still be fine.
Fox News could run it with every disclaimer out there and it would still get picked up by every other conservative channel and site as legitimate.
This is why likenesses are protected.
If you watch the video it's very clear from the beginning that it's a fake voice and they used AI to write the jokes. It says flat out it's not George Carlin. There is no way anyone could be mistaken. Also it only kind of sounds like him.
And when someone edits that part off? What then?
What then? That person may be held liable for whatever crime you believe was committed.
The comedy special not only prefaced the show with multiple disclaimers, but also jokes about it during the special.
If someone wants to edit it to be deceptive, then that's on them.
The creator would have nothing to do with it.
Donald Trump, while president, was impersonated by thousands of people as comedy acts. Some people even had full time gigs doing it!
It's not a illegal when you are doing it for comedy. Pretending to actually be someone who you are not, is fraud, but that's not what we're talking about.
Mimicking someone's voice or putting on a costume in their likenesses doesn't make it illegal.
If it did, then Elvis impersonator festivals would be a mass crime gathering!
Not even for comedy but for art in general.
If we couldn’t impersonate likenesses in art, art would fucking suck. Think of every fictional character who ever met a well-deserved demise that was inspired by a real person.
Hell, look at The Crucible. Required reading when I went to high school. Literally an allegory for the red scare and McCarthy’s communist “witch hunts” going on at the time of its writing.
Not just that, but being critical of the rich and famous, especially high-profile politicians, is an incredibly important part of art. It’s practically the origins of modern theater. And inversely, arts criticism is an incredibly important part of politics.