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Judge: Wind Gone "unabated piracy"| ATLANTA, Georgia, April 20, 2001 -- A federal judge ruled that Alice Randall's The Wind Done Gone infringed on the copyright of Margaret Mitchell's Gone With the Wind epic. Judge Charles Pannell ordered Houghton Mifflin not to continue production. Houghton had responded to the suit, filed by the Mitchell estate, that Randall's work was parody. Under copyright law, original material can be used in a parody. Judge Pannell ha a different take: "The new work's use of copyrighted materials from Gone With the Wind goes well beyond that which is necessary to create a parody and, thus, makes excessive use of the original work." He called Randall's book "unabated piracy." The judge said a parody needs to have a comic element. He found none. Houghton promised to appeal: "Today's ruling, if allowed to stand, will have a chilling effect on all those who seek to use free expression and parody to explode myths and provoke new thinking." |
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WIND DONE
GONE |
Authors: Random House going too far| NEW YORK, April 6, 2001 -- Two organizations representing authors charged that Random House unfairly wants to bar authors from selling books, already issued by Random in printed formats, to an e-publisher for issuance in another form. In a friend-of-the-court brief, the Authors Guild and the Association of Authors' Representatives said Random House wants to lay claim to e-rights even though nobody knew 30 years ago, when some of the contracts were signed, that books would ever be produced in any form other than ink on paper. Random is in court trying stop the Rosetta, an e-publisher, from proceeding. Said the authors and the agents: "With this action, Random House seeks retroactively to re-define the rights it has acquired from authors for generations." |
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Authors object to Random House e-rights| NEW YORK, April 4, 2002 -- The Authors Guild and the Association of Authors' Representatives filed an amicus brief in U.S. District Court in support of ebooks publisher RosettaBooks' claim that it has the right to publish previously published Random House print books in ebook form. Random House claims that RosettaBooks does not have the right to publish those books, some more than 30 years old in book form, in ebook format because those authors signed a contract licensing Random House to "print, publish and sell the Work in book form." Random House claims that "book form" should be interpretted expansively to include ebooks. |
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