What exactly was Dave Winer talking about yesterday when he posted the sentence below, about Alice Randall’s controversial The Wind Done Gone,
Listening to her talk about her family and especially her father, there’s no doubt that the book is literature, not a sequel as the heirs of Margaret Mitchell have claimed.
The last time I checked, a sequel to a novel would generally be classified as literature. Besides which, Randall’s novel has generally gotten very bad reviews with most reviewers noting that had the Mitchell estate not done something as absurd as taking Randall to court, that the novel would have gone largely unnoticed.
The biggest absurdity in the The Wind Done Gone case, however, is that 65 years after Gone With the Wind was first published and 52 years after Mitchell’s untimely death, the novel is still not in the public domain thanks to the several copyright extensions largely bought and paid for by a handful of large media corporations.