in March to stop the publication and distribution of The Wind Done Gone, which chronicles the life of Cynara, a mixed-race daughter of a Southern planter and Mammy, a slave. Mitchell’s estate sued publisher Houghton Mifflin Co. However, people who make “fair use” of a copyrighted work for purposes including criticism and comment are not liable for copyright infringement. It remanded the case for trial on the issue of copyright infringement.Ĭopyright law gives authors a limited exclusive right over their original work. The court did not rule on the question of whether Randall’s work infringed on the copyright of Mitchell’s book because it first had to settle the question of whether the prior restraint was appropriate. The court ruled that there would be no “irreparable” harm because an award of money would remedy any copyright infringement. The injunction, which a federal district court imposed in April, was improper because Mitchell’s estate couldn’t show either of those requirements, Birch wrote.īecause the publisher has a fair-use defense, Mitchell’s estate can’t show that it would likely win its case. To win an injunction, Mitchell’s estate had to show that it was substantially likely to win its claim of copyright infringement and that it would be irreparably harmed by publication of The Wind Done Gone. “Randall’s work flips GWTW‘s traditional race roles, portrays powerful whites as stupid or feckless, and generally sets out to demystify GWTW and strip the romanticism from Mitchell’s specific account of this period of our history,” Judge Stanley F. 10.Īuthor Alice Randall transformed Margaret Mitchell’s Civil War epic into “a very different tale,” the court held in a written opinion explaining its May decision to overturn a federal judge’s injunction that had prevented publication of Randall’s novel. Court of Appeals in Atlanta (11th Cir.) ruled Oct. The Wind Done Gone is a parody of Gone With the Wind and may be entitled to protection as a fair use of the original 1936 classic, the U.S. From the Fall 2001 issue of The News Media & The Law, page 42.

The wind done gone book