Suntrust Bank v. Houghton Mifflin Co.

4 Analyses of this case by attorneys

  1. October 2017: Entertainment Litigation

    Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan, LLPNovember 22, 2017

    Works that criticize, analyze or parody the original work may qualify as lawful fair use, such as The Wind Done Gone, which used characters, plot, and major scenes from Gone With The Wind, but inverted its racial perspective to parody the original. Suntrust Bank v. Houghton Mifflin Co., 268 F. 3d 1257 (11th Cir. 2001). But unlike The Wind Done Gone, most fan fiction does not seek to savage the original work, but to participate in the world—and world view—originally created by someone else.

  2. 10 Copyright Cases Every Fan Fiction Writer Should Know About

    Foley Hoag LLPDavid KluftOctober 18, 2016

    This distinction caused the Court to find that the sequel was not a fair use.Suntrust v. Houghton Mifflin, 268 F.3d 1257 (11th Cir. 2001) We have the notoriously litigious estate of Margaret Mitchell, author of Gone with the Wind, to thank for an excellent lesson about the difference between parody and homage. Mitchell’s estate brought a copyright infringement action against the author and publisher of The Wind Done Gone.

  3. Three’s Company But Two’s a Crowd: Theatrical Parodies of Copyrighted Works

    Foley Hoag LLPDavid KluftApril 8, 2015

    Change your POV: Are you telling the story from the same point of view as the original? The Scarlett Fever case is often compared to SunTrust Bank v. Houghton Mifflin Co.,268 F. 3d 1257 (11th Cir. 2001), in which the Court ruled that the novel The Wind Done Gone was a parody of Gone with the Wind, in part because it told the story from a new perspective: that of a slave. Similarly, Judge Preska noted that 3C is “almost a reimagining of what Jack would have actually experienced if he were homosexual.”

  4. And the Lawsuit Goes to . . . An Oscar-Time Guide to “Best Picture” Intellectual Property Litigation

    Foley Hoag LLPDavid KluftFebruary 17, 2015

    The Wind Done Gone, on the other hand, was a parody. Alice Randall’s book retold the story of Gone with the Wind from the perspective of one of Scarlett O’Hara’s slaves, and intentionally borrowed characters and plot elements from the original in order to critique its romantic depiction of the Civil War-era American South. Mitchell’s estate brought suit and the District Court granted a preliminary junction against distribution of Randall’s book but, in SunTrust Bank v. Houghton Mifflin Co., 268 F. 3d 1257 (11th Cir. 2001), the Eleventh Circuit vacated the injunction as an unlawful prior restraint of speech and held that The Wind Done Gone was fair use.Gone with the Wind merchandise has also been the subject of numerous trademark and copyright disputes, as we have previously reported here.Casablanca (1943) In 1941, Murray Burnett and Joan Allison wrote a play called Everybody Comes to Rick’s, the rights in which they assigned to Warner Brothers before the play was ever staged.