Have a question about how the TVTropes wiki works? No one knows this community better than the people in it, so ask away! Ask the Tropers is the page you come to when you have a question burning in your brain and the support pages didn't help.
It's not for everything, though. For a list of all the resources for your questions, click here. You can also go to this Directory thread
for ongoing cleanup projects.
Well, there are laws allowing free use for the purposes of parody. But that's more about intellectual property, not lifting and redubbing entire scenes...
I think Abridged Series are "legal" in the same way that sprite comics are "legal" - they're not, but it's such a trivial thing that the people who own the property don't really care.
Edited by wrm5^^^ That is like almost literally the definition of "grey area".
If it's so complicated that you can't distill it down to "Yes they are legal except in X Y and Z specific situations" or "No they are illegal except in X Y and Z situations", that's a grey area. Including "No they are illegal but no one cares or prosecutes them." That is also a grey area.
Acknowledging that it is, in fact, a grey area negates the issue of the "recent" phrasing. If someone wants to hunt down what exact law the editor was talking about when they added that line, and change it to a specific timeframe, and explain exactly how they are no longer a grey area, cool, but otherwise, as far as I can see they are in a complicated grey area.
This is, ironically, not complicated.
Edited by SolipSchism

The third paragraph of The Abridged Series contains a violation of Examples Are Not Recent that I don't know how to fix by myself.