Parodies: the fine line between parasitic and original

Parodies are contradictory by their very nature. Both original and parasitic, they identify themselves with a well-known brand but with a humour that is intended to create a distance from it. UK Supreme Court Judge Lord Neuberger summed up the difficulty of assessing parody claims in a speech given in Toronto last year, when he said that they are “easy to define but difficult to pin down ... [and] once pinned down, parody is difficult to fit in the law of trademarks”.