A deal is a deal except when it isn’t, apparently, as the Department of Justice has asked Judge Denise Cote to essentially throw out the settlement terms she already approved and ratified for Hachette Book Group, HarperCollins and Simon & Schuster (and is about to issue final orders on for Macmillan and Penguin) — and impose a harsher set of selling conditions on the publishers as part of the “punishment” of Apple following Judge Cote’s finding of guilt. They now want five years of no agency at all for ebooks at Apple, with the expressed hope that those terms spread […]
Legal
Legal: Rowling Sued Leakers and Wins “Substantial Damages”; Klinger Moves For Summary Judgment Against Conan Doyle Estate
Not only was JK Rowling “very angry” with the attorney Chris Gossage at Russells, who leaked her secret writing identity, but she apparently sued both Gossage and his wife’s best friend Judith Callegari, whose ill-considered tweet unmasked “Robert Galbraith.” A statement read by Rowling’s new attorney in a UK High Court indicated she “was angry and distressed that her confidences had been betrayed and this was very much aggravated by repeated speculation that the leak had, in fact, been a carefully co-ordinated publicity stunt by her, her agent and her publishers designed to increase sales.” Plus, “The claimant has been […]
Pinkus Seeks to Dismiss Latest McIntosh & Otis Suit
Though Samuel Pinkus has yet to respond to Harper Lee’s copyright lawsuit filed last May, he did file a motion to dismiss McIntosh & Otis’s suit from June, alleging he deliberately moved money from one shell company to another to avoid paying the agency more than $850,000. In his motion Pinkus called M&O’s suit a “work of fiction” that is “replete with misleading plot holes” and “wholesale cribbing from the complaint of another party’s pending action” (referring to Lee’s Federal suit). On the matter of whether Pinkus is the alter ego of Veritas Media, and is thus liable to pay that […]
Legal: Penguin Finalizes EU Settlement: Minnesota Settles with Agency Five
The European Commission formally accepted Penguin’s December 2012 settlement on ebook pricing, which essentially follows the Department of Justice settlement conditions and mirrors the “commitments” already made in Europe by the other four settling publishers and Apple. The Commission said in a statement that “after a market test” it “is satisfied that the commitments offered by Penguin remedy the competition concerns it had identified.” (Our standard reminder: The European settlement only affects countries that allow the discounting of ebooks in the first place — so it applies principally to the UK.) Separately, with the final state settlements with Penguin and […]
Penguin Has New eBook Pricing, and Random House Should Follow Shortly
Mainstream media has been scrambling to come up with some kind of impact for consumers related to Judge Denise Cote’s verdict against Apple handed down Wednesday morning, but for now there really isn’t any. (For a refresher, we had looked in early June at what the government said it would want from Apple if they prevailed.) Less noticed — well, not noticed at all until this article, really — is that retailers recently, finally, started to exercise their right to discount selected Penguin ebooks. Given how “consumers suffered in a variety of ways from [the] scheme to eliminate retail price […]
Vanity Fair On The Harper Lee Lawsuit
Harper Lee’s lawsuit against her former agent Sam Pinkus filed in May merits a lengthy feature by Mark Seal in the August issue of Vanity Fair (the magazine published a brief excerpt online earlier this week and provided us with a PDF copy of the entire piece.) While Seal quotes liberally from Lee’s original complaint, and also draws on Charles Shields’ unauthorized biography of Lee for some of the publishing background, he also paints a fuller portrait of the author, now 87 and living in an assisted living facility in Monroeville, Alabama. Though a friend said she is “paralyzed on […]