On December 23 the Authors Guild and the named author plaintiffs filed notice with New York federal court that it intends to appeal Judge Denny Chin’s November 14 dismissal of the case on fair use grounds. The AG was told on December 10 that it had two weeks to file an appeal, and did so right on schedule. Meanwhile, Apple and the Department of Justice continue to square off over the effectiveness of independent monitor Michael Bromwich, with the DOJ filing a 30-page rebuttal to Apple’s request for a stay after it accused Bromwich of charging too much, taking up […]
Legal
Court Affirms Pre-1923 Sherlock Holmes Characters Are in Public Domain, Free for Use
Just before Christmas the matter of Sherlockian Leslie Klinger’s lawsuit against the Conan Doyle Estate to establish whether the character Sherlock Holmes was in the public domain, and that derivative works did not require licensing fees, was resolved, with Judge Ruben Castillo of Illinois federal court granting Klinger’s summary judgment motion for the most part. In his 22-page opinion, Castillo ruled that Sherlock Holmes, Dr. Watson, and any other character first introduced in the 46 Conan Doyle stories and four novels published before 1923 are in the public domain and free for use — but that story elements from 10 […]
Briefs: A Harry Potter Play, Hachette UK’s New Office, and a Microsoft Employee Who Leaked Nook Deal
JK Rowling will co-produce a Harry Potter play intended to debut on London’s West End in 2015, and will collaborate with a playwright on the show, which will focus on “the previously untold story of Harry Potter’s early years as an orphan and outcast.” Already a year in “gestation,” it will be produced by veterans Sonia Friedman and Colin Callender. Rowling said their pitch “was the only one that really made sense to me, and which had the sensitivity, intensity and intimacy I thought appropriate for bringing Harry’s story to the stage.” As announced in September, Rowling is also working on […]
Shareholder Sues Barnes & Noble Over Earnings Restatement and SEC Investigation
The SEC’s two investigations into accounting issues at Barnes & Noble have provoked at least one shareholder lawsuit, filed in New York State Supreme Court on Wednesday. In his complaint, David Shaev accuses the bookseller’s board and several of its executives of breaching fiduciary duties and an abuse of control. “Barnes & Noble has operated with deficient and inadequate financial reporting and inventory management systems since at least 2001,” Shaev said in his complaint. “These systems do not adhere to industrywide best practices and company internal audits have repeatedly shown them to be unreliable and subject to manipulation.” Later he […]
Court Dismisses Bookseller DRM Suit
Fast on the heels of our round-up of a busy year in court for publishing, Judge Jed Rakoff has cleared the docket of one of the strangest cases of 2013. In a 19-page opinion he swatted away the “threadbare allegations” by independent booksellers Book House of Stuyvesant Plaza, Posman Books, and Fiction Addition against the largest trade publishers and Amazon and dismissed the lawsuit. On the vague idea that publishers’ acceptance of Amazon’s proprietary DRM “suggests that there may have been oral agreements or discussions” among the publishers, Judge Rakoff notes “the evasiveness of this allegation is remarkable.” Then there […]
2013: The Year We Gaveled On
We don’t usually play the game of making broad simplistic declarations about players of the year, but in our newsroom 2013 was truly the “Year of the Gavel.” New York Southern District Court Judge Denise Cote — recently the focus of a scathing editorial in the WSJ calling her “a disgrace to the judiciary” — was the dominant Publishing Person of the Year, and no matter what the OED claims, the “word of the year” was certainly not “selfie.” It was “spiderweb,” a term that speaks volumes about the DOJ’s winning trial against Apple on ebook price-fixing charges that was the […]