SHORT TAKES : Novel Ruling by French Court

An appellate court today overturned a lower court ruling that the French novel “La Bicyclette Bleue” was plagiarized from Margaret Mitchell’s 1937 best-seller, “Gone With the Wind.”

The appeals panel presided over by Judge Myriam Ezratty rejected the December, 1989, judgment of a Paris Circuit Court that ordered French author Regine Deforges and the publishing house Ramsay to pay $400,000 to the U.S.-based Trust Company Bank, which owns the worldwide rights to Mitchell’s Civil War novel.

“None of the characters in ‘La Bicyclette Bleue’ are analogous with those of the Margaret Mitchell novel,” the court said in its nine-page ruling.

The court held that “the theme of a young woman who throws herself at the feet of a man who prefers someone else while she is loved by an older man is completely void of originality.”

“La Bicyclette Bleue” was first published in 1982.