On Friday, the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals reversed a lower court’s decision that halted enacting a book banning law in Iowa. The decision, written by Judge Ralph R. Erickson, says that the lower court’s decision was “based on a flawed analysis of the law” and remanded it back to the district court “for further proceedings consistent with this opinion.” The suit, brought by Penguin Random House and joined by Hachette Book Group, HarperCollins, Macmillan, Simon & Schuster, Sourcebooks, and several authors, challenged an Iowa law that would remove from schools any book that describes or depicts sex, regardless of […]
Legal
Former Scribe Media Employees File Motion For Emergency Relief
In the ongoing litigation against Scribe Media, a group of former employees has filed a motion for emergency relief, following an effort by ceo Eric Jorgenson to get class members to take individual payouts in exchange for confidentiality agreements and legal release. The employees declined the offers, which were for two weeks of salary paid out in installments. The group originally sued last year, after being abruptly laid off in May 2023 without severance and with outstanding pay due to them. The suit is currently set for trial in April 2025. The plaintiffs are requesting a curative notice to the […]
Court Rules Against Circumvention of Copyright Protections
A DC Circuit Court rejected an appeal that challenged protections for copyrighted works. The case was originally brought in 2016 by the Electronic Frontier Foundation on behalf of a computer science professor and a tech inventor, who argued that preventing technological measures to circumvent copyright protections, or locks on digital media–as established by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act–was unconstitutional. Their claims were struck down in 2022 in an as-applied case, and now have been denied on a facial basis. In a decision passed down on Friday, Judge Cornelia Pillard wrote, “The First Amendment protects a right to read, but it […]
Second Circuit Probes Internet Archive’s Arguments for Controlled Digital Lending
In a lengthy hearing, the Second Circuit Court of Appeals in New York heard oral arguments in the Internet Archive’s appeal of a lower court finding that their copying and lending of digital copies of books (through their invented practice of Controlled Digital Lending) infringes copyright. In his ruling, District Court Judge John Koeltl found “no case or legal principle supports that notion. Every authority points the other direction.” In keeping with Judge Koeltl’s ruling, which was rooted in opinions from the Court of Appeals in such significant cases as Google Books, Hathi Trust, and ReDigi, the three-judge panel appeared […]
Self-Published Author Sues Amazon Over Audiobook Monopoly
Romance author Christine DeMaio, who writes as CD Reiss, has filed a proposed class action lawsuit against Amazon, claiming that the retail giant’s dominance in audiobook sales eliminates competition and leads to supracompetitive pricing for self-published authors. The suit is filed by class-action law firm Hagens Berman, which was the first to bring the ebook price fixing suit against publishers and Apple in 2011. (Since then, less successfully, the firm has filed suits against Amazon and the large trade publishers over the retailer’s ebook monopoly.) The filing states that Amazon, through the Audible ACX program, charges independent authors a fee […]
TX Book Ban Overturned, Some Titles Returned to Library
On Thursday, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals in Texas upheld part of preliminary injunction returning some banned books to a local library, ruling that “Government actors may not remove books from a public library with the intent to deprive patrons of access to ideas with which they disagree.” The suit was brought by seven patrons of the Llano County, TX library system, who asserted that the government’s 2021 removal of books based on their content “violated their First Amendment right to access information and ideas.” Seventeen books were removed from the library, including “‘butt and fart’ books,” “young adult […]