Looks Like I'm on the Unemployment Line
by Jason Scherer

This may be a stupid question to ask, but have you been keeping up with the news? And no, I don't mean the sports section (which I don't even bother with anymore - I refuse to be left at the altar by the Red Sox again). I mean the arts and entertainment section, of course. Here's a tidbit from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution:

A U.S. District Judge down in Atlanta ruled that a parody of Gone With The Wind called The Wind Done Gone committed copyright infringement. Well, the author, Alice Randall, did the infringement - it's not like a book can do much except lie there. Anyway, the judge said that "the new work's use of copyrighted materials from Gone With the Wind goes well beyond that which is necessary to create a parody and, thus, makes excessive use of the original work.'' Just so you know, the estate of Margaret Mitchell was the plantiff, and now production of the book has been halted.

I'd like to point out three items, if I may: 1. What the hell is "excessive use of the original work?" Sounds kind of arbitrary to me. 2. Both Harper Lee and Toni Morrison went to bat for the book. Morrison even gave testimony in court. Morrison is a bloody Nobel Prize winner - not exactly a crackpot, one could say. 3. The book Gone With The Wind isn't that great. Oh sure, we all love the movie - hell, even I do. But the book . . . well, it's kinda boring.

So it looks like pretty soon, we here at Quantum Muse, purveyors of parody, will soon be out of a job. After all, satire is a good chunk of our bread's butter. Well, it's a good chunk of my butter, anyway.

Now that I think of it, a ton of people and organizations have ripped off copyrighted work. Most of them don't even give credit to the original people. Here's a few I can think of:

1. NASA. They ripped off Arthur C. Clarke's idea for geosynchronous satellites.
2. Motorola, Nokia, and any other cell-phone manufacturer. Ever notice how much many cellphones resemble the old communicators in classic Star Trek?
3. Most every fantasy writer of the 20th century, who have borrowed quite liberally from J.R.R. Tolkien
4. Me. The serial I'm publishing on here, The Fire Under The Ashes, takes a hell of a lot from The Art of War and The Prince.
5. Jung for ripping off Freud's ideas. Or was it the other way around? . . .
6. Ray for imitating Ted Kazynski (5 bucks to anyone who can remember who he was) and Mike for trying to be David Berkowitz (and why can't psychos have names that are easy to spell? No matter how many different ways I enter those two names in, my spellchecker says they're wrong).
7. Airplane, Hot Shots (parts one and duex), Robin Hood: Men in Tights,and The Mists of Avalon.
8. Any movie adaptation of an old TV show. Well, we shouldn't sue them - we should drag those filmmakers behind a deserted barn and perform various ornate Inquisition tortue techniques on them.

Let's face it. There are only so many good ideas out there. Come to think of it, I don't think there's been a really great idea since diet soda (regular soda gives me wicked heartburn). And really great ideas get done over . . . and over . . . and over. Then they become as ripe as my feet in the summertime. Ripe for parody, that is. It's just such a shame I'll only be able to collect unemployment from now on. Hey, wait a minute - why is that a bad thing?

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