the letter box project / copyrights, intellectual property, literary critici

[Catlady (Rita Prince Winston)]

--- In HPFGU-OTChatter at yahoogroups.com, "Carol" <justcarol67 at ...> wrote:

> I haven't read "the Wind Done Gone," so I have no idea whether it
> violates copyright (assuming that "Gone with the Wind" is not yet in
> the public domain) or plagiarizes the original work, nor whether it
> qualifies as a parody and is therefore protected, but if it were a
> straightforward literary analysis quoting portions of the original
> novel to support its argument, it would be allowed.

Most important to me: Privileging commentary done in the form of a
legal brief or a series of syllogisms over commentary done by telling
a story is -- I want to call it 'cultural imperialism', but some will
complain that the term doesn't apply because both are in our same
culture, so I'll settle for 'arbitrary and tyrannical'. 

Because it is certainly in our culture to tell stories like The Boy
Who Cried Wolf instead of lecturing children on how to gradually
eliminate the response to a conditioned stimulus by presenting the
stimulus without the expected reward, and for adults to make their
point better by saying "he's just crying wolf" instead of "He said
so-and-so on such a date and he was wrong. He said this other thing on
this other date and he was wrong. He said ... He said ... He said ...
He has an established history of being wrong about everything. So he's
wrong about this, too."

Less important to me: I haven't read it either, but "Gone With the
Wind" must still be under copyright or there wouldn't have been a
lawsuit. From news coverage of the lawsuit, I gathered that "The Wind
Done Gone" is another novel with many of the same characters and some
same events. The estate accused it of being an 'unauthorized sequel',
which seems to me to be entirely a legal matter, having nothing to do
with the academic impropriety called 'plagiarism', because both the
authorized sequel and the unauthorized sequel make no secret (both
brag of it) of being based on Margaret Mitchell's "Gone With the Wind"
-- no one is taking away Mitchell's credit for having made up her
story and her characters first. If any chunks of text were ctrl-C'ed
from Mitchell's text and ctrl-P'ed into the sequels without a
footnote, the authorized and unauthorized sequels would be equally
guilty of the academic meaning of plagiarism. (At least, I don't
remember Honor Code saying anything about getting the permission of
the copyright holder makes it okay not to footnote.)

The hired writer of the authorized sequel (I don't remember her name)
 was interviewed during the news event and asserted, I suppose quite
sincerely, that a writer's characters are her babies and she remains
attached to them forever and for someone else to make them do things
is a like (the someone else) is raping her babies, so Mitchell was
surely rolling over in her grave. She (the hired writer) was quite
certain that what she had written was okay with Mitchell because she
was so respectful of loving the characters as much as Mitchell did.
Her argument was based entirely on how the author felt about it, while
the estate's argument was that for people to have a choice of which
GWTW sequel to buy would take away sales and profits rightfully
belonging to the authorized one. The hired writer's argument about the
author rolling over in her grave would apply just as much to negative
commentary that didn't take the form of a story. The estates's
argument has nothing to do with academic integrity.