Professor Wins $240K In Fair Use Dispute 150
Posted
by
kdawson
from the happy-bloomsday dept.
from the happy-bloomsday dept.
pickens writes "In a victory for Fair Use, Stanford Law School's Fair Use Project has announced that the estate of 20th century literary giant James Joyce, author of the landmark novel Ulysses, has agreed to pay $240,000 in attorneys' fees to Stanford University Consulting Professor Carol Shloss and her counsel in connection with Shloss's lawsuit to establish her right to use copyrighted material in her scholarship on the literary work of James Joyce. When Shloss used copyrighted materials in her biography of Joyce's daughter Lucia, titled Lucia Joyce: To Dance in the Wake, she had to excise a substantial amount of source material from the book in response to threats from the Joyce Estate. However following publication of the book, Shloss sued the Estate to establish her right to publish the excised material. The parties reached a settlement regarding the issue in 2007, permitting the publication of the copyrighted material in the US. Following the settlement, Shloss asked the Court to order the Estate to pay attorneys' fees of more than $400,000. She has now agreed to accept an immediate payment of $240,000 in return for the dismissal of the Estate's appeal. 'This case shows there are solutions to the problem Carol Shloss faced other than simple capitulation,' says Fair Use Project Executive Director Anthony Falzone, who led the litigation team."
More An Issue of Censorship Than Copyright (Score:5, Informative)
When Shloss used copyrighted materials in her biography of Joyce's daughter Lucia, titled Lucia Joyce: To Dance in the Wake, she had to excise a substantial amount of source material from the book in response to threats from the Joyce Estate.
Copyright was used to get the material out of the book but was that the motive? I know little of Lucia Joyce despite being a big fan of James Joyce. And a lot of what was in the New Yorker's well written lengthy article was news to me. At the bottom of the second page they state that Carol Shloss believes Lucia's insanity and mental instability was mishandled or even cruelly worsened by many actions. And that as Joyce worked tirelessly to finish Finnegan's Wake, he had to rely on others and institutions to take care of his delicate daughter. Shloss concludes that Lucia was a price paid for one of the greatest books written. And then the interesting part:
But, as Shloss tells it, the silencing of Lucia went further than that. Her story was erased. After Joyce's death, many of his friends and relatives, in order to cover over this sad (and reputation-beclouding) episode, destroyed Lucia's letters, together with Joyce's letters to and about her. Shloss says that Giorgio's son, Stephen Joyce, actually removed letters from a public collection in the National Library of Ireland. When Brenda Maddox's biography of Nora was in galleys, Maddox was required to delete her epilogue on Lucia in return for permission to quote various Joyce materials.
Shloss claims go so far as to state that Lucia was a pioneering artist squashed and erased from history by her relatives. The New Yorker sounds dubious to Shloss' claims and she has little evidence. It's possible that the Joyce Estate would rather keep Lucia under wraps and un-speculated about ... and the only route they had to suppress this work was copyright. I do not think censorship is copyright's intended use and that may very well be why this case failed. Although it's often misused like this, this in no way seems to have any motivation to protect the original copyright holder and their designated livelihood from their art.
Would you think less of Joyce if you agreed that he sacrificed the mental stability and well being of his daughter to complete a novel? Would you think less of him if it was confirmed that he had contracted syphilis or that that is what caused him to go blind? Or that he wrote dirty letters to his wife? All these things may or may not be true. James Joyce was very human and I think this may be a case of his estate attempting to keep private matters about his daughter Lucia private.
I was curious about the estate. (Score:5, Informative)
Not everyone is eager to expand upon academic study of Joyce, however; Stephen Joyce, James' grandson and sole beneficiary owner of the estate, has been alleged to have destroyed some of the writer's correspondence,[49] threatened to sue if public readings were held during Bloomsday,[50] and blocked adaptations he felt were 'inappropriate'.[51] On 12 June 2006, Carol Schloss, a Stanford University professor, sued the estate and prevailed for refusing to give permission to use material about Joyce and his daughter on the professor's website.
I have no public comment other than I guess this is what the current copyright laws have brought us and I'm not sure if this is what the founders had in mind.
Re:Some solution (Score:4, Informative)
I doubt she actually paid out that much; I wouldn't be surprised if she didn't pay a cent. You can get attorneys fees even for pro bono cases.
Re:I was curious about the estate. (Score:3, Informative)
So how exactly do you think these things normally work? That there are magic estate management companies or something?
Re:Yeah, you'd have to pay me to read Joyce too! (Score:3, Informative)
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is really good and mostly readable (you might want to skip over the 20 page Miltonian sermon in the middle). I tried to read Ulysses and gave up about a third of the way through. I occasionally come across a copy of Finnegan's Wake flip through it and read a few random passages - bizarre is the only word I can use to describe it.
Re:Proves my point (Score:2, Informative)
But yeah, Joyce died 68 years ago and this is his grandson who's doing all this.
Joyce estate owner an antagonistic control freak. (Score:3, Informative)
The stuff in the linked articles is nothing, read this: The Injustice Collector: Is James Joyce's grandson suppressing scholarship? [newyorker.com]
Stephen Joyce to a James Joyce scholar he disagreed with: "You should consider a new career as a garbage collector in New York City, because you'll never quote a Joyce text again."
Re:More An Issue of Censorship Than Copyright (Score:3, Informative)
Re:More An Issue of Censorship Than Copyright (Score:5, Informative)
Ulysses? A lot of people. Finnegans Wake is the one that's a slog. Ulysses is pretty straightforward.
Re:More An Issue of Censorship Than Copyright (Score:3, Informative)
Not the original intent ("to promote useful arts").
A minor nit: Copyrights are meant to promote the progress of science. The useful arts is what patents are meant to promote the progress of. 'Science' back in the late 18th century, meant something more like general knowledge. The useful arts, however, meant applied technology, basically. You can still see some hints of the latter meaning, in that patents protect state of the art technology, where the inventions are useful (an invention that doesn't work, like a perpetual motion machine, is useless, therefore unpatentable) but you can't get a patent if your invention was anticipated by prior art, and of course the invention must be disclosed so as to be able to be practiced by a person having ordinary skill in the art. As for copyrightable creative works, they not only don't have to be useful, but in some cases if they are useful, they cannot be copyrighted!