I always like it when expectations are confounded, and stereotypes defied.

For instance, it pleases me that the woman who wrote this middle-american middle-of-the-road song for the country music star Trisha Yearwood…is a 42-year-old African American woman who went to Harvard.

Alice Randall is the songwriter's name, and - to further defy the stereotypes - she's also a serious novelist. Her first book is called The Wind Done Gone, and it has an excellent postmodern premise -- it's the diary of Scarlett O'Hara's half-sister, a slave half-sister invented by Randall, who outlives Scarlett and marries Rhett Buttler. Essentially, it's Gone With the Wind and Tara re-imagined from the slaves', not the slaveholders,' point of view.

For instance, in Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind the slave Prissy famously says…

"I don't know nothin' bout birthin' babies!"

In Randall's The Wind Done Gone, Prissy's not a comic ditz at all, but cleverly fakes hysterical incompetence in order to cover up a crime.

And the character based on Ashley Wilkes in the new novel is, at last…overtly gay.

The Wind Done Gone sounds like a smart and interesting and funny novel. I say "sounds" smart and funny, because I haven't read the book - I can't read the book, because it can't, at least for the moment, be published. At the end of April a federal judge in Atlanta -- yes, Atlanta, where Margaret Mitchell is a deity and Gone With the Wind is an industry - ruled that The Wind Done Gone infringes on the 65-year-old copyright of the Margaret Mitchell estate. Randall's novel, the court's decision said, is "unabated piracy."

This is a bad decision.

It's obvious that Alice Randall is engaged in literary play, not commercial "piracy."

We have for many years now inhabited an age in which art and entertainment

is often all about earlier art and entertainment - referring to other works, even baldly borrowing and incorporating chunks from other works. It happens high and low, everywhere from pop music, where sampling has been rampant for decades in rap, to ironic quotations of other artworks in painting and photography.

Randall calls The Wind Done Gone a "parody" of Gone With the Wind. It sounds more ambitious than that to me. I have a feeling that's a legal spin, strategically intended, since there is well-established legal precedent protecting the right of parodists to parody.

In fact, as it happens, I played a small part in establishing that precedent. A dozen years ago, I helped produce a spoof of several famous contemporary novels - Bright Lights Big City, Less Than Zero, Slaves of New York -- in the form of a parody of Cliff's Notes…for which we were promptly sued, in a federal case called Cliff's Notes, Inc. versus Bantam Doubleday. Like Alice Randall, we lost our case in federal district court. But, I hope also like Alice Randall, we then won on appeal in the court of appeals.

A few years later, our Cliffs Notes case was cited in a case that went to the

United States Supreme Court. Roy Orbison, the white southern creator of this song from 1964…

"Pretty Woman walkin' down the street…"

…had sued 2 Live Crew, the black urban creators of this parody in 1989.

And the Supreme Court ruled in favor of the parody.

I suppose now that I'm a novelist myself, I ought to be on the other side of the fence. With the interests of my own hypothetical literary estate to protect, I should be sympathetic to Margaret Mitchell's heirs, and do everything I can to extend the life and power of my copyrights.

But you know?

Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn.

This is Kurt Andersen in Studio 360.