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William Faulkner Estate Sues Washington Post Over Freedom Quote

On Thursday, the owners of the rights to the late author's literary masterpieces sued Sony Pictures Classics over a line spoken in Woody Allen's Midnight in Paris.
Faulkner Literary Rights LLC has followed up that lawsuit with another on Friday targeting The Washington Post Company and Northrop Grumman Corporation over something Faulkner wrote about freedom in 1956 in Harper's Magazine.
The plaintiff says the defense contractor wasn't at liberty to lift it in a full-page Independence Day advertisement in The Washington Post.
STORY: HBO Pacts With David Milch for Faulkner Adaptations
The legal claims might very well be intentioned as serious, but the choice of quotes triggering litigation could merit as much discussion in an editorial meeting of The New York Review of Books as it will soon in a Mississippi federal courtroom.
In the Midnight in Paris claim, Faulkner's heirs targeted a line uttered in the movie by Owen Wilson that said, "The past is not dead! Actually, it's not even past," which was derived from Faulkner’s Requiem for a Nun, which had a passage that declared, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”
OK, the act of remembering things past gives new life to things supposedly gone. That much is clear from the very fact that Sony is being sued over a quote from an author who died sixty years ago.
The obvious defenses are fair use and free speech, which makes the second lawsuit's quote-in-controversy equally interesting. This time, Faulkner's heirs are going after commercial speech, which gets less First Amendment protection.
In this new lawsuit, the Faulkner estate says Northrop Grumman's July 4th advertisement used and attributed to Faulkner the quote, "We must be free not because we claim freedom, but because we practice it."

14:56 | |

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