Legal

The defendants in the Tracy Wolff plagiarism case, which include author Tracy Wolff; Emily Sylvan Kim at Prospect Agency; Entangled Publishing and their distributor Macmillan; and Universal City Studios, which optioned the book, have filed a Motion of Reconsideration with the court, still trying to avoid a trial and bring the case to a close. The parties are being sued in the Southern District of New York for copyright infringement by writer Lynne Freeman, who alleges that Wolff’s Crave series bears “overwhelming and undeniable” similarities to Freeman’s unpublished manuscript Blue Moon Rising. Recently, the court dismissed some of the claims […]

Donald Trump’s lawyer Robert Garson sent two letters to to Judge Gardephe in the Southern District of New York to try to expedite his case against S&S and Bob Woodward over THE TRUMP TAPES audiobook. In the first letter on November 20, Garson urged Gardephe to schedule oral arguments — even though, as we reported recently, the judge has yet to rule on a motion to dismiss from last year and thus discovery has been stayed. He wrote, “The Court is aware that President Trump is soon due to be inaugurated as the 47th President of these United States of […]

A federal judge in Florida has urged the Escambia County School Board to settle a book-banning case brought by PEN, PRH, and others, mindful that it has cost local taxpayers hundreds of thousands of dollars. As of last September, the school board had already spent more than $440,000 on attorneys’ fees. District Judge T. Kent Wetherell II wrote in the footnote of a court order that a settlement, “should be particularly important to (the school board) because it is spending taxpayer money to defend this suit and it could end up having to pay all or part of Plaintiffs’ attorney’s […]

A standard year-end feature, various organizations are starting to make lists of notable works entering the public domain on January 1, 2025. Notable books coming out of copyright include: A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway; The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner; A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf; Tarzan and the Lost Empire by Edgar Rice Burroughs; Red Harvest by Dashiell Hammett; Ellery Queen’s first mystery The Roman Hat Mystery; The Crime at Black Dudley by Margery Allingham; the first English translation of All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque; and more.     […]