Event: Videoconference with Attorney Joe Beck, sponsored by the UT College of Law, Intellectual Property Law Society (IPLS)
Location: Room 1013, University of Toledo, College of Law
Date & Time: Friday February 12, 2010 / 11:45 am prompt—Lunch will be provided
Contact: Dale Bricker at dale.bricker@rockets.utoledo.edu
The Wind Done Gone (2001) is the first novel written by Alice Randall. It was a bestselling novel that reinterprets the famous American novel Gone with the Wind (1936) by Margaret Mitchell. The plot of Gone with the Wind revolves around a pampered Southern woman named Scarlett O’Hara, who lives through the American Civil War and Reconstruction. The Wind Done Gone presents an alternate look at the same story, told from the viewpoint of Scarlett’s half-sister Cynara, a mulatto slave on Scarlett’s plantation. As the story unfolds, readers learn of Cynara’s hatred of the white half-sister she calls Other and the privileges bestowed upon Other yet denied Cynara even though they are raised side by side. Both sisters fight for the attentions of Mammy (Cynara’s mother and Other’s nanny) as children, and for the love of the same man as adults. Through the eyes of Cynara and the other now freed slaves, readers get unique perspectives of life on a Southern plantation and of the Reconstruction era.
Legal Controversy
The estate of Margaret Mitchell sued Alice Randall and her publishing company, Houghton Mifflin, on the grounds that The Wind Done Gone was too similar to Gone with the Wind, thus infringing its copyright. The case attracted numerous comments from leading scholars, authors, and activists, regarding what Mitchell’s attitudes would have been, and how much The Wind Done Gone copies from its predecessor. After the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit vacated an injunction against publishing the book in Suntrust v. Houghton Mifflin (2001), the case was settled in 2002 when Houghton Mifflin agreed to make an unspecified donation to Morehouse College, a historically African American college in Atlanta, Georgia, in exchange for Mitchell’s estate dropping the litigation.
The cover of the book bears a seal identifying it as “The Unauthorized Parody.” It is parody in the broad legal sense: a work that comments on or criticizes a prior work. This characterization was important in the Suntrust case. However, the book is not a comedy, as the term “parody” would imply in its common usage.
Attorney Joe Beck
Joseph Beck is a partner at Kilpatrick Stockton in Atlanta, Georgia. He served as counsel for Alice Randall and Houghton Mifflin Publishing and successfully defended The Wind Done Gone as a parody. Mr. Beck was recognized in The Best Lawyers in America for Intellectual Property Law, Entertainment Law and Alternative Dispute Resolution in 2010 and the 10 years immediately preceding. He was named a 2009 Georgia “Super Lawyer” in the areas of Intellectual Property Litigation, Intellectual Property, and Entertainment & Sports by SuperLawyers magazine. In his videoconference with the University of Toledo College of Law he will be discussing the strategies of putting together a winning defense, as well as the challenges and skepticism encountered along the way.
