“Escape from Tomorrow” is in many ways your typical low-budget indie film. It’s shot in black and white, the actors aren’t famous, and the plot is surreal. There is one thing, though, that makes “Escape” completely different. The entire film was surreptitiously shot inside of Disney World. With what can only be described as generous bravado, the director, Randy Moore, bought season tickets and secretly filmed his actors at the theme park. Disney World is a major part of the plot: it’s on the “It’s a Small World” ride that the lead begins to lose his sanity; later, he is tasered and held inside Spaceship Earth, the golf-ball-esque Epcot Center icon.

New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and other news organizations have speculated that “Escape from Tomorrow” must violate Disney’s rights and that its lawyers will seek to have the film enjoined. At the Sundance Film Festival, where the film premièred this week, Moore was onstage answering questions when someone in the audience asked, roughly, “Why did you put so much work into a film that violates so many laws?”

But the underlying assumption of that question—that Disney has a good trademark or copyright case—is wrong. Though the filmmakers may have committed trespass when they broke Disney World’s rules and if it violated the terms of entry on their tickets, the film itself is a different matter. As commentary on the social ideals of Disney World, it seems to clearly fall within a well-recognized category of fair use, and therefore probably will not be stopped by a court using copyright or trademark laws.

Before I address the questions of law, here’s the plot of the film, which is, in fact, murkier: A typical American family is on vacation at Disney World, when the father, Jim, finds out that he has been fired. Jim begins to act strangely, and his perception of their day at the park becomes twisted and scary. Aided by the use of black-and-white film, the familiar Magic Kingdom is transformed into something abjectly terrifying, as friendly icons morph into monstrous forms. The father imagines that his son and a creepy man in a wheelchair want to kill him. He also becomes obsessed with a pair of sexy teen-age French girls, and he trails them around the park inappropriately. A nurse warns him that he may contract the cat flu. In the end, his fears are warranted: he is captured and tortured by secret agents, his son turns on him, and he dies a gruesome death that involves coughing up huge hairballs. The film drags and meanders at times, but its potential for cult status cannot be denied.

“Escape from Tomorrow” is, essentially, a commentary on a shared social phenomenon, namely the supposed bliss of an American family’s day at Disney World. In Moore’s version, the day is a frightening and surreal mess that destroys the family forever. The film isn’t so much a criticism of Disney World itself but of the unattainable family perfection promised by a day spent at the park.

It’s important to understand that Disney does not have some kind of general intellectual-property right in Disney World itself. It is not a problem to film the Magic Saucer ride. The case would depend on the appearance of Disney’s trademarks or copyrighted works in the background of the film, like when Goofy wanders by or when we see the waving robots in “It’s a Small World.” Filming these works without justification would be an infringement of the copyright law. The question is whether they are “fair use”—or in other words, whether technical infringements are negated because they are justified by public policy. If there were a fire in Times Square, TV-news teams would be free to film there despite all of the copyrighted billboards in the background, given the public’s interest in the reporting and the First Amendment’s protection of the press.

Under copyright law, commentary and parody are well-established fair-use categories, and this is where the film likely falls. It would be one thing if Moore merely used Disney World to embellish his film—to serve as a pleasing backdrop for some light romantic comedy. But his use of Disney World is not as simple window dressing; he transforms it into something gruesome and disturbing—a place where, for example, guests are sometimes tasered and have their imaginations purged.

A fair-use finding also depends on the effect of the use on Disney’s market for its works. It might be a violation if Moore had made a film designed for viewers who wanted to see Disney World but were too lazy to go to Florida. “Escape from Tomorrow,” however, is clearly no substitute for buying a ticket. Meanwhile, with relevance to the trademark law, there is no real chance that anyone would plausibly think that the film was sponsored by or affiliated with Disney. The scene where a Disney Princess attempts to crush a child seems to eliminate that possibility.

A famous case over the artist Thomas Forsythe’s “Food Chain Barbie” series is similar to this one. In the late nineteen-nineties, Forsythe created a line of artistic photographs of Barbie under attack by various vintage appliances. According to Forsythe, he wanted to “critique the objectification of women associated with [Barbie], and to lambast the conventional beauty myth and the societal acceptance of women as objects because this is what Barbie embodies.” His work made just thirty-seven hundred dollars, but Mattel sued for both copyright and trademark infringements. The courts threw out the complaints under a fair use and First Amendment rationale. The judges were so annoyed by the lawsuits that they awarded attorney’s fees of nearly two million dollars to the artist.

The similarities with “Food Chain Barbie” are obvious. Both make use of an American icon with associated social ideals (perfect womanhood, in Barbie’s case). Both use art to comment on or criticize that social meaning. In neither case is the commentary the only purpose of the art work, but it doesn’t need to be. Ultimately, both “Food Chain Barbie” and “Escape from the Future” are legitimate art projects, and it is a serious thing for judges to place prior restraints on cultural output. This is not a case about counterfeit Mickey Mouse watches or bootlegged “Toy Story” DVDs. Disney is free to stop that sort of thing all it likes. But a judge has to think about the First Amendment when asked to ban art work.

“Escape from Tomorrow” ultimately raises a larger question of what you might call cultural freedom, or the freedom to comment on or reimagine the great cultural icons of our time. It’s the same question raised by fan fiction and remix artists like Jeff Koons. Disney would surely have preferred that Moore and his team have asked for permission before making the film. But it seems unlikely to have been granted: and a world where Disney gets to determine everything said about Disney World would be a poor place indeed.