a book i read

Siva Vaidhyanathan's Anarchist in the Library spells out a lot of problems that the United States and United States copyright law specifically, are facing today. One story that I thought was really interesting was that of Alice Randall. She was the woman who wrote The Wind Done Gone. She and Houghton Mifflin were sued by the estate of whoever wrote Gone With the Wind because it used their "property." The Supreme Court ruled that Randall's book was a parody of the original work Gone with the Wind. Parodies are apparently allowed under current copyright law.

Siva sums it up perfectly at the end of this story though when he begs the question, what if Randall did not have the help of a major publisher? Would she have won this decision if she were less important to a huge company financially? I may be skeptical of the US court system, but I tend to think she would not have. I think if it was the estate of a famous American writer, versus some woman who "stole" most of her story, the courts would side with the estate.
As was said in the book, the system is said up so that winning breeds winning and losing breeds losing. If everything is copyrighted and protected to such an extent that it prevents new ideas from getting off the ground, that limits cultural expansion. Which is pretty fascist.
Really though, I want to hear from an avid pro-copyright person, because I feel like we've only read texts from people who feel copyright law is too strict. I really want to hear from Lars Ulrich (a very specific example, which hopefully some people know). He is in the band Metallica, and was one of the artists spearheading the case against Napster. I want both sides of this argument. I also want to close my eyes and not open them until December 7th.