Steve Cavendish already posted about Sheriff Hall's bizarre "Get out of Jail Free" campaign materials. (When I got it in the mail, I briefly thought it was a genius mailer put out by Hall's opponent, suggesting Hall lets his friends out of jail. But no...) And I agree that Parker Bros. may indeed send the Sheriff a mean letter, but does that really mean Hall's campaign has done something illegal?

The tricky thing about copyright cases is that they pretty much have to be litigated in order to know if infringement has happened or not. Sure, if you publish The Sun Also Rises under your name, that's a no-brainer, but I'm talking about copyright infringement as it happens in the real world. Hall's campaign, say what they want about altering the look of the card, is directly ripping off the "Get out of Jail Free" card from Monopoly. The joke doesn't work if you don't know what that yellow card means. So, clearly illegal copyright infringement, right?

But not so fast. It's clearly a joke, in fact, one might argue that it's clearly a parody and Hall's clearly a politician. Parody is an exception to the copyright law and politicians are usually given a lot of leeway by the courts when using parody in political ads. MasterCard Int'l Inc. v. Nader 2000 Primary Comm., Inc. established that political ads aren't "commercial" in the sense that a politician using someone else's copyrighted material isn't benefiting from the use commercially and it established that politicians could do a really spot-on rip-off of copyrighted material and it fall under the parody fair use exception — in that case Ralph Nader had a political ad based on MasterCard's "Priceless" campaign.

So, it's plausible that Hall's campaign's use of Parker Bros.' intellectual property might also be seen by the courts as "fair use" since it's non-commercial and a parody. (Editor's note: The bad Photoshop job where they clearly scanned and then did a quick cutout of the Mr. Pennybags character is probably the issue here, just sayin'.)

More interesting is the Rocky Top issue. On Tuesday, the State House voted to allow the town of Lake City to change its name to Rocky Top, even though the rightsholders to the song "Rocky Top" are trying to stop them. On the surface, this would seem like a losing proposition for the rightsholders — The House of Bryant — because, in general, titles aren't copyright-able. Think of it this way, even though typing "Man in Black" into Google will get you Johnny Cash and Will Smith & Tommy Lee Jones (which proves that one could be confused for the others), a song title similar or the same as a movie title (or heck, as we saw with the Rock City marches, even other song titles) isn't a copyright issue.

And isn't the name of a town analogous to the title of a song or a book?

But here's where this one gets tricky. According to the Times Free-Press, the developers looking to change the name of Lake City are openly attempting to cash in on confusion:

Last year, a group of East Tennessee public officials and businessmen began promoting the idea of creating a real Rocky Top. The group promised to help build a massive tourist complex in Lake City, a town of about 1,800 people, if it legally changed its name.

Why would there be any interest in a massive tourist complex except because people want to see the place they think the song is written about? These folks are attempting to make money off of the intellectual property of the House of Bryant. They're counting on confusing people into believing this is the place.

The fact that they're attempting to change the name in order to directly monetarily benefit from the town's association with the song leaves a real possibility that the courts might find in favor of the House of Bryant. Otherwise, what's to prevent me from renaming my front yard "Low Places" and then charging tourists to take pictures standing in my front yard so they can tell everyone they have "Friends in Low Places, Tennessee?"

Oh, holy cow, that's my retirement plan! I claim it. If Lake City wins, don't you all be stealing my idea!