It will be interesting to see what the Court of Appeals does with this. If they do as law and precedent would indicate, they should reverse the district court with a particularly scathing opinion for ignoring some remarkably plainly stated case law.
Then again, the district court should have dismissed the case with a remarkably scathing opinion at the trial level. So somehow, I rather doubt that it will disappear all that easily.
Replies: 2 comments
I completely agree that "The Wind Done Gone" should be published without restriction, but I think the author of that article was taking the wrong tack by ascribing its attempted suppression to white prejudice-- that's completely ignoring the recent case involving a similar retelling of Lolita by an Italian woman (her name, and the name of her "re-quel" escape me) and the estate of Vladimir Nabokov.
That, and while I'm open to the concept that laws regarding parody are disproportionately enforced against black artists, the example that person chose regarding John Updike and Shakespeare is a faulty one, since the entirety of Shakespeare's works had passed into the public domain centuries before John Updike was born. That's not the case with Pretty Woman or Gone with the Wind.
Posted by Mark @ 05/01/2001 02:02 AM CST
I pretty much agree with you on her comments about the disproportionate enforcement against black artists. As far as you can tell from the article, she's essentially reasoning from a population of one, which any lawyer (never mind a statistician) would say is a very bad thing to do when you're trying to show a trend. I was mostly interested in the argument that there was a very definite precedent set by the 2Live Crew case that should have controlled.
That said ... it seems that it may not control. Another person notes that protected parody works are generally brief--even 2Live Crew's parody of "Pretty Woman" only ran 4 minutes or so (although it parodied the entire song). The sheer length of The wind done gone may place it in an entirely different category ( article at http://www.therecord.com/entertainment/e040353.html ).
The Lolita parody was called "Lo's Diary", BTW. Interesting article on it at http://www.nytimes.com/books/99/09/26/bookend/bookend.html
Posted by iain @ 05/01/2001 12:01 PM CST
Copyright © 2001, Iain Jackson, after-words.org
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