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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."
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.
My work here is dung.
This case shows there are solutions to the problem Carol Shloss faced other than simple capitulation
Yes - the solution is to be lucky enough to find a lawyer that's willing allow their bill to get up to $400,000 but settle for $240,000 just so they can fight a legal battle that shouldn't be in front of the courts anyways. Almost half a million to fight a battle in which she was obviously right? It's wrong that that fight occurred at all... Thank goodness her lawyer was willing to go the distance.
I understand how hard it was for him to write his books. After all, it's not every author who decides to chuck the whole language and invent his own (I'm looking at you, Tolkien).
Anyway, here's some background for anyone unfamiliar with Joyce's works.
Wikipedia
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.
It's NOT me! It's the meds! I'm on 1000mg of Fukitol.
Yes, there are solutions. If you can afford to put out $400k in lawyers fees upfront, and then only receive $240k of that back for a $160k loss.
I mean, seriously. My regular rates.
Oh, and, of course there's this to back me up.
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
'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."
Yes, a solution that takes years to go through and costs hundreds of thousands of dollars. That's a great solution, if you're a lawyer.
Not a typewriter
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.
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 : )
Personally, if it has anything to do with James Joyce; I'll wait for the Cliff Notes.
The US government have made it clear that we have no inalienable rights; any we do not defend vigorously will be taken.
Copyright is the government-backed enforcement of "you're not allowed to say that, because I said it first."
By definition, copyright is the antithesis of free speech. There is no either/or here - copyright *is* censorship.
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.
The stuff in the linked articles is nothing, read this: The Injustice Collector: Is James Joyce's grandson suppressing scholarship?
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."
> 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.
She copy/pasted a large portion of the book, and copycatting is very different from "saying it first/second".
No, I think you're just misunderstanding the earlier poster. By 'saying it second' he likely means repeating what someone else has said by copying from them, as opposed to independently saying what coincidentally happens to be the same thing.
Free speech does not give one a blanket right to abuse/use other people's property for personal benefit without permission or payment.
Well, I'd dispute the use of the word 'property' there. Let's stick with 'creative works,' in which case, yes, that's precisely the sort of thing that a right of free speech has to do with. For example, if I have a copy of Shakespeare's plays, and I can abuse them by bowdlerizing them, or I can use them by performing them verbatim, or even just reprinting them and selling copies. My right of free speech permits me to do this, regardless of the fact that I didn't write those plays. I don't need permission, and I don't need to pay.
When we grant copyrights, we are temporarily ceding part of our right of free speech. Given how dreadfully important free speech is, surely we wouldn't make such a grant lightly. Nor would we likely do so unless there were some public purpose which was better served by making the grant than by not, and where the size of the grant served that purpose better than a grant of some greater or lesser size.
What purpose do you think would be so important as to justify this? How might we fine-tune copyright so as to best serve that purpose?
A hint: The public purpose is very direct, very self-serving; the means of promoting it is very indirect, however, and may benefit others in the process.
These authors spend several years of their lives creating these novels and many decades mastering the art and craft of writing.
Well, they're not obligated to. If an author can crank out a brilliant novel in the space of a week, with no practice at all, he is no more and no less deserving of a copyright than any other author. Copyright law doesn't care about how much work an author does. In fact, the Constitution prohibits rewarding an author with a copyright merely for his hard work.
And just like doctors or lawyers, they want a fair return on that investment.
Oh, I'd be perfectly happy getting an unfairly large reward on no investment at all. Don't feel troubled to do otherwise on my account. ;)
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.
Copyright ensures no such thing. It encourages authors to create works of all levels of quality with the hope that, if a particular work is popular, the copyright on that work can be exploited to make money. There's no policy in favor of good works over bad; the government cannot and should not make such decisions. There's no guarantee that an author will make money; a good, but unpopular work can be a flop, and authors can always mismanage their affairs. And certainly no end of authors have had to work at real jobs.
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.