As expected, Senator Elizabeth Warren won a lawsuit brought against her by a publisher and authors who said her letter to Amazon criticizing their book amounted to a First Amendment violation. In 2021, Warren wrote a letter to Amazon claiming that Joseph Mercola and Ronnie Cummins’s THE TRUTH ABOUT COVID-19 included vaccine misinformation and calling out the retailer’s algorithms that allowed the book to show up at the top of search results. The authors, along with Robert F. Kennedy, Jr (who wrote the foreword) and publisher Chelsea Green, sued Warren, arguing that her letter infringed on their First Amendment rights […]
Legal
All the President’s Legal Deficiencies In Woodward Audio Suit
Attorneys for author Bob Woodward and his publisher Simon & Schuster recently filed a variety of responses to Donald Trump’s suit from January, alleging in a Pensacola, FL Federal Court that the audiobook (and print version) of THE TRUMP TAPES: Bob Woodward’s Twenty Interviews with President Donald Trump was published without Trump’s permission and infringes his rights. For starters, the defendants laugh at the filing of the suit in Pensacola, and ask for dismissal due to improper venue, or at least a transfer to courts in Washington, DC or New York’s Southern District. As they argue, “None of the substantial […]
Australian Publisher Fagan Charges Allen & Unwin With Sexual Harassment
Correcting and updating a story we ran earlier, Allen & Unwin publisher Kelly Fagan has made “allegations of sexual harassment by a former publisher at the company over a two-year period,” according to her attorneys at Maurice Blackburn Lawyers. Those lawyers say her harassment claim alleges “that she was sexually harassed at work.” The charges were referenced in a recent Sydney Morning Herald article that says, “The literary world is in a lather over a sexual harassment lawsuit filed in the Federal Court by one of the industry’s most prominent publishers, Kelly Fagan, against her employer Allen & Unwin.” The […]
Publishers and Internet Archive Make Slow Progress on Terms of Judgment
When US District Court Judge John Koeltl found quickly and overwhelmingly in publishers’ favor on March 24, granting summary judgment finding the Internet Archive guilty of copyright infringement on a mass scale, he gave the parties 14 days to submit proposals “for the appropriate procedure to determine the judgment to be entered in this case.” Since then the parties have been in regular contact, petitioning the court regularly for extensions. On Wednesday, ahead of the latest deadline on April 27, they got the judge’s permission for a fourth extension, until May 12. In their letter to the judge they wrote: […]
Employees at Barnes & Noble Education’s Rutgers Location Look to Become Chain’s First Union Store
Employees at a Barnes & Noble Education store on the campus of Rutgers University are petitioning to become the first unionized outlet among the chain’s 785 stores. Bloomberg reports that worker says most of the approximately 70 employees at the Rutgers store have signed on. Last Thursday that filed with the National Labor Relations Board to hold an election on unionizing. The group wants to join the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union. The workers who spoke to Bloomberg indicated they seek better pay, job security and more stable work hour.
Future Commissions To Be Sold in Donadio & Olson Bankruptcy Auction
A bankruptcy auction for the assets of former literary agency Donadio & Olson will be held on April 19. The agency filed for chapter 7 bankruptcy in December 2018 after being defrauded by their outside bookkeeper, Darrin Webb. Bankruptcy trustee Deborah Piazza will auction off three assets: commissions, judgements, and remnant assets. Since the shutdown of the agency, publishers have paid agency commissions to the trustee, while sending royalties directly to the authors. The trustee’s lawyer, Robert A. Wolf at Tarter Krinsky & Drogin, estimates that the estate has received about $300,000 in commissions, which is used to pay legal and […]