There’s been a lot of sound and fury over two lawsuits alleging copyright infringement filed by the owner of the literary rights to William Faulkner’s works. Faulkner Literary Rights LLC filed one suit against Sony Picture Classics and another against Northrop Grumman Corporation and the Washington Post Company in federal district court in Mississippi. In the first suit, it said that Woody Allen’s film Midnight in Paris used a quote from a Faulkner novel without permission. The other suit said that Northrop Grumman ran a full-page advertisement in The Washington Post that quoted a Faulkner essayalso without first obtaining permission.
Publications ranging from The Hollywood Reporter to The Christian Science Monitor and The New York Times ran somewhat incredulous stories after the lawsuits were filed, and the blogosphere was filled with comments that mocked and ridiculed the plaintiffs for bringing the cases. But intellectual property lawyers say the litigation may not be ridiculous after all, as some aspects of U.S. copyright law are vague. This is especially true of the “fair use” doctrinea limitation in copyright law that allows the use of copyrighted material in certain circumstances without the copyright owner’s consent. And while Sony and Northrop Grumman will likely cite fair use as a defense, the man who represents the Faulkner estate strongly believes that these were not instances in which the doctrine applies.
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