BLUNT DOESN'T ENJOY A GOOD JOKE

It's interesting that whenever the copyright industries call on Europe to adopt regulations ever closer to their generous treatment in America, they never suggest we adopt the right to use works royalty free for the purposes of parody. It's that lack of a right to parody that kept Phil Pope in cheques writing similar-but-not-infringing versions of popular tunes for Radio Active and Spitting Image. And, if we had such a right, James Blunt and his management wouldn't have been able to bully a site into taking down a rewriting of You're Beautiful.

We're far from sure why they bothered - yes, it did take the piss out of Blunt and the song, but he's been a marine. If you can take being stripped to the waist and being buggered by a rolled-up carpet or whatever it is that they get up to in the marines these days, surely you can cope with a gentle ribbing? Or are they worried about loss of earnings? "Well, I had been going to buy a copy of You're Beautiful as a Valentine's Day gift for my beloved, but I've made a copy of a track about how dirgey James Blunt is off my computer to give instead. It's exactly the same thing."

No, it just smacks of a kneejerk reaction from a management office. We'd suggest that exposing your charge as a humourless bastard to shut down a mild joke that was doing no harm would be the sort of management decision they'd teach you against in that Harvard Business School. Or on the cassette-tape versions of their courses.

music james blunt