On April 20, a federal judge named Charles Pannell, Jr., barred Houghton Mifflin from publishing Alice Randall's novel The Wind Done Gone--a takeoff on Gone With the Wind from a slave's perspective--on the grounds that the book's borrowings of characters and scenes constitute "piracy." The ruling has prompted widespread critical derision and may well be overturned on appeal, but it ought to serve as a wake-up call about the trend toward excessive protection of intellectual property rights.

We are so used to a politics of blurred class interests in America that clarity
is actually confusing. Throughout our history, the major parties have been
economically heterogeneous, and the basic tenets of the American creed have
denied any legitimacy to class as a basis of political action--except, that is,
for measures in aid of the great, sprawling middle class that is ideally
supposed to embrace nearly everyone. Democrats lean to labor but regularly
nominate multimillionaires for office, and Republicans lean to business but
appeal to the moral traditionalism of many working families. In recent years,
despite the unions' continued effectiveness in mobilizing their members to vote