Slashdot Mirror
Professor Wins $240K In Fair Use Dispute
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."
I've always insisted that copyright should end with the death of the original author. This pretty much proves my point. He's DEAD... at this point, no amount of protection of his work is going to encourage him to produce more! His heirs should go out and get a real job instead of trying to live off his reputation.
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
I don't know about you guys, but I'd be a bit hesitant to have my family's issues put in the spot light - even if the perpetrators are long dead: J. Joyce died 68 years ago. Yeah, Joyce is dead, but his grandson has got to live with these things now.
Just a guess as to his motives.
It's NOT me! It's the meds! I'm on 1000mg of Fukitol.
The author spent $400k in attorney's fees defending her right to quote Joyce in a book about Joyce's daughter?
Is there a bigger market than I'm aware of in scholarly (slash: arcane?) books about Lucia Joyce??
Who the hell would spend this much on this issue??
------ The best brain training is now totally free : )
aside:
At the bottom of wikipedia's Portrait page is this link...
The reader's list makes me want to bash my skull against a wall.
For the ignorant, Ulysses is about a day in the life of Dublin as seen through the eyes of a Jewish advertising salesman (Leopold Bloom) and the young James Joyce (Stephen Dedalus). It covers everything from the red light area through to the literary and medical world around Trinity College. You have to learn a bit about Ireland in the early 20th Century to understand it. It helps to have a copy of Harry Blamires' Bloomsday Book if you aren't up on Irish history and the geography of Dublin. Ulysses is written in perfectly good English without made up words, in different literary styles (part of it is a play) loosely organised on the return of Ulysses from the Trojan War. Bloom is Ulysses, Dedalus is Telemachus, Molly Bloom is Penelope and the IRA doesn't get a very good Press. Real people walk in and out of the plot. And that's as much of a spoiler as I'm prepared to divulge.
As I say, people will read Tolkien or fiction set in Ancient Rome and yet can't be bothered to spend the time - in bits, if necessary - to get to know Ulysses. But it's one of the greatest works in English of the 20th century, and if you don't try, it's your loss. Finnegans Wake (note no apostrophe) is another matter. Personally I believe the syphilis story, but also I suspect that Joyce was schizophrenic and as he got older it got more out of control. I think it's a failed experiment.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
How does such retarded tripe get modded up? Did you RTFS? She copy/pasted a large portion of the book, and copycatting is very different from "saying it first/second".
More blatantly false rubbish. Free speech does not give one a blanket right to abuse/use other people's property for personal benefit without permission or payment. These authors spend several years of their lives creating these novels and many decades mastering the art and craft of writing. And just like doctors or lawyers, they want a fair return on that investment. Copyright ensures that people who can write good books get paid so they don't have to find a real job working in a supermarket or other manual labor.
> How does such retarded tripe get modded up?
Well, at least yours hasn't been, yet.
> ... other people's property ...
And since when does does other people's "property" rights expire after a certain time after they die? You play the "property" card badly. There is property, and then there is property.
You should read the entirety of that blog. Not just the post I linked to.
> Copyright ensures that people who can write good books get paid so
> they don't have to find a real job working in a supermarket or other
> manual labor.
In theory. But that doesn't mean that their work cannot be used within the boundaries of law; the case in question being one of them, it seems.
And your use of the word "ensures" makes me think of another point made in that blog: just because something is under copyright doesn't magically imbue it with commercial value. The converse of that is true, also.
Why should there be an Estate? James Joyce is dead, he's had his incentive to create literary works. His son doesn't need his father's incentive, the ability for him to create his own, copyrighted work is his incentive. Time to give James' works to the public, where they belong.
ERROR: SIG NOT FOUND (A)bort, (R)etry, (F)ail?:
Tis hard to understand how someone who wrote Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit also wrote The Silmarillion