With trademark candor, Macmillan ceo John Sargent’s year-end letter to authors, illustrators and agents presents more than the usual amount of updates. Counteracting any year-end punditry, Sargent says they “have completed the court-ordered mediation process with the DOJ without any progress toward settlement” and will proceed to trial. He held his letter after Penguin’s settlement was filed yesterday, but :after some long thought, I’m sending you the letter I wrote unchanged. That is because our position has not changed.” Sargent forsees another suit coming, saying that “now even our friends in Canada are taking a look,” and clarifies that their […]
Legal
People
At Balzer + Bray, Sara Sargent has been promoted to associate editor. In the UK, Joel Rickett has been promoted to publisher of Viking UK and Portfolio UK. Ruth Alltimes will move to Harper Children’s UK as publishing director, fiction in January, reporting to fiction and licensed properties director, Rachel Denwood. She has been publishing director of the fiction list at Macmillan Children’s UK. Patti Smith discusses with Billboard her plans for a few books she is working on “simultaneously,” including her next memoir. She says it “is in more of the ‘Just Kids’ vein and even in the similar time period, […]
Penguin Settles with the DOJ, Removing A Merger Hurdle and Answering A Merger Question
On Wednesday afternoon, the Department of Justice announced it had reached a settlement with Penguin, “one of the largest book publishers in the United States,” of the ebook pricing lawsuit that Penguin had previously vowed to litigate in court. (Indeed, in April, Penguin Group ceo John Makinson had defiantly underscored that “alone among the publishers party to the investigations that resulted in today’s announcements, we have held no settlement discussions with the DOJ or the states.”) The settlement, which again requires the approval by Judge Denise Cote of New York’s Southern District Court, imposes the same basics terms as the approved settlements between […]
Overlook’s Lawsuit Over MASTER AND MARGARITA eBook Rights Involves Complex Copyright Issue
Looking at the full filing in Overlook Press’s December 6 lawsuit against Daria Shilovskaya and Sergei Shilovskiy asserting the publisher’s right to produce an ebook edition of Mikhail Bulgakov’s THE MASTER AND MARGARITA, the matter is both complex and particular to a legal wrinkle that applies only to books that have had their US copyright restored. The question of essence the suit seeks to answer is whether the ebook version of the translation is a new derivative work, or the continued exploitation of a work that is already permitted. So this case is quite particular to works in translation from […]
Overlook Sues In Attempt to Affirm Right to Publish eBook Edition of Bulgakov’s MASTER AND MARGARITA
Overlook has filed suit against the grandchildren of Russian author Mikhail Bulgakov claiming that the ebook edition of MASTER AND MARGARITA does not violate copyright, Courthouse News reports. (The full complaint is not yet available in any federal court docket.) Overlook acquired the US copyright to Bulgakov’s classic novel (written in 1937 but not published until 1967, more than 25 years after Bulgakov’s death) in 2001 when it bought Ardis Press, which originally commissioned the book’s current English-language translation in 1995. Though Overlook “acknowledges that Bulgakov’s grandchildren own rights to the underlying copyright,” they dispute the heirs’ contention that the […]
People, Etc.
At Penguin Group’s Portfolio, Sentinel, and Current imprints, Kristen Gastler has been hired as a senior publicist (she was at Doubleday). Margot Stamas has moved over to the group as a publicist from Putnam and Riverhead; Christy D’Agostini has been promoted to senior publicist; and Jacquelynn Burke has been promoted to publicist. Last Friday Gawker “published here for the first time” Lena Dunham‘s highly-designed and illustrated 66-page book proposal, which you think would be protected by copyright. (They also dragged Scribd.com into the potential infringement by using the service to host and post the PDF.) When we contacted Random House […]