Courts have long recognized that the First Amendment protects parodies, and last Friday, EFF filed a “friend of the court” brief urging a state court of appeals in Michigan to apply the same protections to parodies posted on Twitter as to parodies everywhere else. The plaintiff in this case, Levitt v. Felton, argued that Twitter should be treated differently. But as we explained in our amicus brief, there's simply no reason to treat Twitter differently. In the case, Todd Levitt, a self-proclaimed “BadAss Lawyer,” got upset after a Central Michigan University student created a Twitter account mocking his badass marketing strategy. The Twitter account bears the name Todd Levitt 2.0 and is described as “[a] badass parody on our favorite lawyer.” Despite the constitutional protection for parodies, Levitt sued the account’s creator, Zach Felton, for defamation, libel, false light, and intentional infliction of emotional distress, among…
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