Midnight in Paris suit thrown out of court
A US court has dismissed claims that the film Midnight in Paris infringed the copyright of Requiem for a Nun when it used a famous quote from the cross-genre novel.
The estate of late author William Faulkner sued Sony Pictures last year after its 2011 movie, directed by Woody Allen, used the words “the past is dead. It’s not even past”, a line from the 1950 novel.
In the film, which follows a Hollywood screenwriter with literary ambitions, Owen Wilson says: “The past is not dead. Actually, it’s not even past. You know who said that? Faulkner, and he was right. I met him too. I ran into him at a dinner party.”
In response to the suit, Sony filed a motion to dismiss, which was upheld on fair use grounds at the US District Court for the Northern District of Mississippi on July 18.
Analysing the claims, Judge Michael Mills said: “It is difficult to fathom that Sony somehow sought some substantial commercial benefit by infringing on copyrighted material for no more than eight seconds in a ninety minute film.
“The court is highly doubtful that any relevant markets have been harmed by the use in Midnight. How Hollywood’s flattering and artful use of literary allusion is a point of litigation, not celebration, is beyond this court’s comprehension.”
He added: “The court, in its appreciation for both William Faulkner as well as the homage paid him in Woody Allen’s film, is more likely to suppose that the film indeed helped the plaintiff and the market value of Requiem if it had any effect at all.”
A Sony Pictures spokesman said: “We were confident that the judge in this case would get it right, and he did.”
The court got it “exactly right”, said Brett Heavner, partner at Finnegan, Henderson, Farabow, Garrett & Dunner LLP.
“This was a super-tough case that was probably unlikely to succeed,” he added, unless the film had re-worked some of the book’s major themes into its production.
Dale Cendali, partner at Kirkland & Ellis LLP, said US copyright law traditionally allows the use of literary allusions in books and films without that use amounting to copyright infringement.
Speculating on the estate’s reasons for filing the case, she said: “I assume they have some business in licensing quotations, which is common for coffee mugs and decorative use on walls, but this is a different kind of use.”
“Had it been something like that, they definitely would have had a stronger case,” Cendali said.
Heavner added: “I don’t understand the estate’s motive for bringing the case ... There must have been an emotional desire to protect the sanctity of Faulkner’s works or to show filmmakers and authors trying to use quotes from a Faulkner novel that they would need formal approval.”
William Faulkner, who died in 1962, twice won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction.
Lawyers for the Faulkner estate did not respond to a request for comment.
