The estate of William Faulkner would seem to have opened up a real can of worms with a lawsuit agains Sony Pictures Classics over a Faulkner quote paraphrased in Woody Allen’s Academy Award-nominated film Midnight In Paris.

Faulkner Literary Rights filed the suit in U.S. District Court in Mississippi for copyright infringement, commercial appropriation and violation of the Lanham Act.

“Sony’s actions in distributing the Infringing Film were malicious, fraudulent, deliberate and/or willful,” reads the complaint. “Sony did not have Faulkner’s consent to appropriate William Faulkner’s name or his works for Sony’s advantage.”

The Birth of a Literary Prize

There are times in life when we are galvanized by inequity. So it was for a group of women who were touched by a panel at the recent Vancouver Writers Festival and determined to do something to right a perceived wrong.

The Writers Festival panel looked at facts: since 1901, the Nobel Prize for Literature has only been taken home by a woman a dozen times. In Canada, the prestigious Stephen Leacock Memorial Medal for Humour has been awarded to only five women since 1947. Of the Giller Prize’s 19 winners, seven have been women and much less than half of the winners of the Governor-General’s Award for English-Language Fiction have been women.

The piece is here--->

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