Can Gone with the Wind Defeat Australia’s Copyright Laws?

Andrew writes to Creative Commons South Africa from America about a couple of weird and interesting copyright cases have popped up in recent weeks.

Gone with the Wind is best-known as a famous movie from Hollywood’s golden years. (It was released in the same year as classics like The Wizard of Oz, Stagecoach, and Wuthering Heights.) Gone with the Wind is the story of Scarlett O’Hara, a Southern plantation heiress and her struggles during the American Civil War. But Gone with the Wind first presented its somewhat rosy view of the pre-Civil War southern U.S. as a book. Written by Margaret Mitchell, her heirs, the Mitchell estate, take a pretty strict line with what the estate sees as a violation of Mitchell’s copyright. In 2001, the Mitchell estate challenged Alice Randall’s right to publish a parody of Gone with the Wind called ‘The Wind Done Gone‘, told from a slave’s point of view. They lost and the suit served primarily to publicize Randall’s book.

Now the Mitchell estate has a new problem: What to do when copyrights expire at different times in different countries? In Australia, Gone with the Wind’s copyright expired in 1999 while it won’t expire in the U.S. for decades. The expiration of the Aussie copyright allowed Project Gutenberg, a nonprofit internet publisher of public-domain works to have its Australian affiliate publish a public domain copy of the book on the internet. The problem for the Mitchell estate was that this public domain copy was also inevitably available to Internet users in other countries, including the U.S., where the book’s copyright is still valid. The result: although the Mitchell estate temporarily succeeded in getting Project Gutenberg Australia to take down their internet version of the book, the book is now back up and available. The problem with keeping the work unavailable is that it would deprive Australians of the opportunity to download public domain copies of the book from the internet as they are legally entitled to do. In effect, the country with the longest copyright protection period would be able to maintain that term on other countries’ internet sites as well, by claiming that global access would destroy their property.

Expect future disputes along these lines.