Legal

Though many offices on the East Coast were shuttered Monday, the Supreme Court was open for business and heard arguments on the closely-watched Kirtsaeng v. John Wiley & Sons case. Lower courts have supported Wiley’s contention that the first-sale doctrine does not apply to goods produced overseas (in this case overseas editions of their textbooks, which they don’t want to see resold in the US), and those books cannot be resold domestically without the manufacturer’s permission. In the closest comparable case, Costco v. Omega, the court divided 4-4 on a similar question regarding watches. (Justice Elena Kagan recused herself because […]

Earlier this week a federal court judge threw out a lawsuit against McGraw-Hill seeking class-action status in which photographer Bob Cordell claimed the publisher had deprived him of foreign royalties for his manuscript “Designing Audio Power Amplifiers.” The case should be of interest for those following suit against Harlequin over ebook royalties that we covered earlier this week. In the complaint, Cordell alleged that McGraw-Hill “systematically violates its contracts with its authors by failing to remit royalties based upon the amounts received from third parties for sales of works outside of the United States, when these third parties are the […]

On October 19 Harlequin responded to a class action-seeking lawsuit launched this summer by three authors — Barbara Keiler, writing as Judith Arnold; Mona Gay Thomas, writing as Gayle Wilson, and Linda Barrett. The suit alleges that the romance publisher deprived them of ebook royalties by funneling agreements through a Swiss-based subsidiary, which “licensed” ebooks to Harlequin’s actual publishing entity. In their reply, Harlequin denied the allegations, said they acted exactly as the contracts provided and sought to dismiss the suit entirely as being without merit. Harlequin’s basic argument is that, since the authors aren’t arguing the contracts were done “in bad […]