{"id":56282,"date":"2014-03-21T12:37:25","date_gmt":"2014-03-21T12:37:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.indexoncensorship.org\/?p=56282"},"modified":"2017-07-21T09:59:37","modified_gmt":"2017-07-21T08:59:37","slug":"letter-parody-must-protected","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.indexoncensorship.org\/newsite02may\/?p=56282","title":{"rendered":"Letter: Parody must be protected"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The following letter was printed in <a href=\"http:\/\/www.telegraph.co.uk\/comment\/letters\/10712774\/The-vote-to-save-satire.html\">The Telegraph<\/a>:<\/p>\n<p>SIR \u2013 The British sense of humour is famous around the world. Anyone who has watched Prime Minister\u2019s Questions can see that even our MPs are funny \u2013 occasionally intentionally.<\/p>\n<p>Satire is a vital tool for campaigning organisations to create debate, expose hypocrisy and change opinion. However, the importance of parody in public debate is not recognised in copyright law. This omission has led to the removal of material that is undoubtedly in the public interest \u2013 such as Greenpeace films taken down from YouTube.<\/p>\n<p>Since 2005, two governments have run reviews on copyright, both of which said that there should be a copyright exception to allow parody.<br \/>\nWe now have less than a week for the Government to commit to a vote. If it doesn\u2019t, the opportunity to change the law may be postponed until after the next election. That isn\u2019t funny. We call upon Vince Cable, the Business Secretary, and Lord Younger, the minister for intellectual property, to act now and ensure that an exception to copyright for parody is put into law.<\/p>\n<p>Jenny Ricks<br \/>\nDirector of Policy, ActionAid UK<\/p>\n<p>Maureen Freely<br \/>\nPresident, English PEN<\/p>\n<p>Kirsty Hughes<br \/>\nChief Executive, Index on Censorship<\/p>\n<p>John Sauven<br \/>\nExecutive Director, Greenpeace UK<\/p>\n<p>Thomas Hughes<br \/>\nExecutive Director, ARTICLE 19<\/p>\n<p>Ann Feltham<br \/>\nParliamentary Co-ordinator, Campaign Against Arms Trade<\/p>\n<p>Niall Cooper<br \/>\nDirector, Church Action on Poverty<\/p>\n<p>Simon Moss<br \/>\nManaging Director, Programs, Global Poverty Project<\/p>\n<p>Phil Booth<br \/>\nCoordinator, medConfidential<\/p>\n<p>Jim Killock<br \/>\nExecutive Director, Open Rights Group<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The following letter was printed in The Telegraph: SIR \u2013 The British sense of humour is famous around the world. Anyone who has watched Prime Minister\u2019s Questions can see that even our MPs are funny \u2013 occasionally intentionally. Satire is a vital tool for campaigning organisations to create debate, expose hypocrisy and change opinion. However, [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":14,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","_mi_skip_tracking":false},"categories":[366,6534],"tags":[5673,3689],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.indexoncensorship.org\/newsite02may\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56282"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.indexoncensorship.org\/newsite02may\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.indexoncensorship.org\/newsite02may\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.indexoncensorship.org\/newsite02may\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/14"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.indexoncensorship.org\/newsite02may\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=56282"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.indexoncensorship.org\/newsite02may\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56282\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":81468,"href":"https:\/\/www.indexoncensorship.org\/newsite02may\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56282\/revisions\/81468"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.indexoncensorship.org\/newsite02may\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=56282"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.indexoncensorship.org\/newsite02may\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=56282"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.indexoncensorship.org\/newsite02may\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=56282"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}