Friday May 25 1:19 PM ET
By Karen Jacobs
ATLANTA (Reuters) - A U.S. appeals court on Friday overturned a publication ban on a black writer's apparent parody of the epic novel of the Old South ``Gone With The Wind,'' written from the point of view of black slaves instead of Southern aristocrats.
A three-judge panel of the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals (news - web sites) in Atlanta had been asked by the publisher of Alice Randall's ''The Wind Done Gone,'' to overturn a lower court ruling in April that prevented publication of Randall's book due to alleged copyright infringement of Margaret Mitchell's ``Gone With The Wind.''
``It is manifest that the entry of a preliminary injunction in this copyright case was an abuse of discretion in that it represents an unlawful prior restraint in violation of the First Amendment (of the U.S. Constitution),'' the appeals court said in its ruling.
Lawyers for the Mitchell estate, who argued earlier on Friday that Randall's book was an unauthorized sequel that pirated the content of Mitchell's classic, said they would request that the entire 11th Circuit court rehear the case.
Randall's publisher, Houghton Mifflin Co., which argued that Randall's book was parody and thus protected by the First Amendment, said on Friday that it expected to go ahead with publication of the book by the end of June. Publication had originally scheduled for early June.
``I put a lot of heart and soul in this book. It's important now for everyone to get a chance to read it,'' Randall said shortly after the ruling.
Portraying life in the Old South from the viewpoint of a mixed-race daughter of a Georgia plantation owner who appears to be a half-sister of ``Gone With the Wind'' heroine Scarlett O'Hara, Randall's book rebutted the disparaging caricatures of blacks in Mitchell's original.
Blacks have for years harshly criticized Mitchell for providing a flawed version of history that mythologized slave owners and downplayed the brutality faced by blacks during the Civil War and Reconstruction eras.
Mitchell's book, which topped bestseller lists for two years after it was first published in 1936, is surpassed in sales by only a handful of books, including the Bible. It also inspired the 1939 film of the same name, one of the most popular movies ever made.
Malcolm X once described seeing the film ``Gone With The Wind'' as one of the seminal events that led him to become a black militant leader. Slain civil rights leader the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. had no love for either the book or film.
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