From the lawsuit filed last week in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Mississippi by Faulker Literary Rights, LLC against Sony Pictures Classics:
- In describing his experiences, [Midnight in Paris's main character] Pender speaks the following lines ("the Infringing Quote"): "The past is not dead! Actually, it's not even past. You know who said that? Faulkner. And he was right. And I met him, too. I ran into him at a dinner party."
- The Infringing quote is taken from a passage contained in the William Faulkner book "Requiem for a Nun" ("the Book"), where it reads: "The past is never dead. It's not even past." ("the Original Quote.").
Faulkner also is reputed to have said, "The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial means and hold it fixed so that a hundred years later, when a stranger looks at it, it moves again since it is life." Or something like that. "Arresting motion by artificial means for a hundred years?" Sounds a little bit like copyright.
HT: ABA Journal
