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I would think that there is some issue with copying music, I think you have to at least credit the writers of the music. I know that Vanilla Ice got in trouble for sampling "under pressure" and not crediting Freddie Mercury and David Bowie.
Here is Wikipedia's answer:
Mad Magazine provoked an early legal backlash against parody when in 1961 the magazine published a songbook in which various topical ditties such as "The Last Time I Saw Maris", "Albert Einstein," and "There's No Business Like No Business" were included (in poem format; with a parenthetical phrase after each title, stating "Sung to the tune of..."). Several music publishers joined in a suit taking the magazine to court. The matter was eventually decided by the U.S. Supreme Court, which declined to review the decision by a lower court dismissing the suit against Mad.
Musical parodists were briefly an endangered species again, in the mid-1990s when a case (Campbell v. Acuff-Rose Music, Inc.) was brought before the U.S. Supreme Court by country music legend Roy Acuff's music publishing company against the lead singer of the rap music group 2 Live Crew for recording a lewd version of one of Acuff's songs without his permission. But the justices ruled in favor of the rappers, protecting the fair use doctrine and creating a legal standard for parody as protected derivative work.
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