Copyright and Parody:Taking Backward the Gowers Review

In 2006 the Gowers Review of Intellectual Property made a series of recommendations for reforming the intellectual property regime to better serve the interests of both consumers and industry. Among the proposed recommendations was that an exception for parody be introduced within the Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988. In January 2008 the Intellectual Property Office (the IPO) launched the first part of a two-stage consultation process on exceptions to copyright. As part of that consultation process, the IPO proposed a ‘fair dealing style exception’ for parody, and sought views on whether a new exception should be introduced as well as what form it might take. In December 2009 the IPO launched the second stage of this consultation process. The second consultation document rejected the case for a new parody exception. This article considers the place of parody within the copyright regime and the objections levelled against the introduction of an exception set out within the IPO's second consultation document. It invites the IPO to reconsider its decision not to recommend the introduction of a specific exception for parody within the UK.

‘Should we try to Self Remember while playing Snakes and Ladders?’: Dr. Gambit as Gurdjieff in Leonora Carrington’s The Hearing Trumpet (1950)

Arising from the Paris surrealist group, the English-born writer and painter Leonora Carrington (England 1917 - Mexico 2011) was perpetually suspicious of orthodoxy and she often pokes fun at, parodies, and, ultimately, upsets traditional hierarchies of power. In her work animals impart wisdom, Goddesses loom large, and domestic spaces become sites of occult power. In this paper I will investigate Carrington's suspicion of gurus with claims to esoteric truth. Carrington participated in Fourth Way groups run by students of Gurdjieff (Christopher Fremantle) and Ouspensky (Rodney Collin). However, while she had a deep interest in the teachings, Carrington remained suspicious of the group practices of the Fourth Way, as can be seen in Elena Poniatowska’s fictionalised biography Leonora (2015). This articles explores Carrington's contact with the ‘Work’ in order to shed light on the character of Dr. Gambit in her 1950 novel, The Hearing Trumpet, commonly thought to be a parody of Gurdjieff. In doing so, it will investigate Carrington’s feminist objections to the role of the guru, while also contributing to a discussion of the unease some felt toward the praxis of the Fourth Way, despite their attraction to the philosophy.

Mr Micawber anticipates Feist: transformations of mental labour.

This paper traces transformations of mental labour and its distribution between human and machine from Mr Micawber's parody of arithmetical calculation (result happiness) in the mid-19th century to the late 20th century judgment of the Supreme Court of United States in Feist v. Rural (1991), concerned with copyright in databases.