Through the looking glass: Alice and the constitutional foundations of the public domain.(Conference on the Public Domain)

Law and Contemporary Problems, January, 2003 by Benkler, Yochai

I

INTRODUCTION

A. The White Rabbit

Alice Randall, an African-American woman, was ordered by a government official not to publish her criticism of the romanticization of the Old South, at least not in the words she wanted to use. The official was not one of the many in Congress and the Administration who share a romantic view of the Confederacy. It was a federal judge in Atlanta who told Randall that she could not write her critique in the words she wanted to use--a judge enforcing copyright law. Randall is the author of a book called The Wind Done Gone. (1) In it, she tells a story that takes off from Gone with the Wind (2) from the perspective of Scarlet O'Hara's mulatto half-sister. In 2001, more than fifty years after Margaret Mitchell...

Read the rest of this article with a Free Trial at HighBeam Research.

Premium Content Partnership | HighBeam Research provides an in-depth online archive library of reference works.