Campbell v. Acuff-Rose is the precedent at the Supreme Court level for parody, even commercial parody, potentially qualifying as fair use. Other lower courts ha

Campbell v. Acuff-Rose is the precedent at the Supreme Court level for parody, even commercial parody, potentially qualifying as fair use. Other lower courts had held as much in earlier cases, as well as in other cases holding that works were not parody in the sense relevant for copyright (crucially, that they were not commenting on the work they copied from). Campbell not only held that "Pretty Woman" by 2 Live Crew was fair use as parody, but also discussed the distinction of parody and satire: "Parody needs to mimic an original to make its point, and so has some claim to use the creation of its victim's (or collective victims') imagination, whereas satire can stand on its own two feet and so requires justification for the very act of borrowing." To some extent it simply codified a distinction already present in lower court decisions, but as the Supreme Court precedent it set the standard nationwide. The case doesn't explicitly hold that satire is not fair use, or even that parody is fair use. Fair use is a case-by-case, multi-factor test that characteristically lacks bright lines. A "merely" satirical work that copied less of the original, or was extremely transformative, could be fair use. Parody and satire often co-exist and even "parody-ness" is a sliding scale that can affect the analysis. In practice though, Campbell is a pretty "bright-ish" line: if a commercial work obviously copies from an original, a court calling it "satire" as opposed to "parody" is almost certainly not going to find fair use.