To summarize, it would feel like talking around the elephant in the room if I had a pompous speech that was given by a techbro oligarch invoking something like class solidarity (among oligarchs) to rally them behind his leadership during a crisis that DIDN’T reference-drop that “who is John Galt?” quote, or for that matter a few other steaming drippings from the Ayn Rand canon.
I’ve read about libel laws and copyright, but considering that much of what I read said “you’re probably fine if you’re neutral to positive about the fiction being portrayed (I’m not) and if you’re uncertain just ask the estate of the author for permission (no).”
I could make it plausibly deniable, of course, but I wonder if my self-published book trilogy runs the risk of putting itself in legal jeopardy if it directly insults a dead terrible person that was a primary ideological contributor to the hellworld we now live in.
as your attorney I advise you to take advantage of the small penis rule
Parody is specifically exempt from copyright infringement cases
I’m not entirely sure if I was writing parody as much as I was writing ideological criticism. I had characters in my story fight over ownership rights to call themselves by that fictional character’s namesake and the fight got so prolonged and ugly that the “John Galt estate” in my story’s fictional Martian colony is sort of cursed, with multiple claimants to the NFT-like “rights” to use the name and all of them hate each other and some have died under mysterious circumstances.
