Legal

Ellen Knight, the former NSC official who oversaw the prepublication review of former national security advisor John Bolton’s book, filed an extensive and extraordinary letter with the court in the DOJ’s case against Bolton. Through her attorney Kenneth L. Wainstein, Knight describes a “designedly apolitical process [that] had been commandeered by political appointees for a seemingly political purpose.” She says that White House officials, starting with the National Security Advisor Robert O’Brien and acting through NSC attorney Michael Ellis, a “political appointee with no previous classification authority experience,” falsely and erroneously found that Bolton’s book contained classified information. Knight says […]

As Congress has been investigating big tech companies for anti-competitive behavior and searching for ways to regulate these ever-growing giant entities, three publishing trade organizations have joined together to focus attention on the obvious monopoly that is easy to address. The chief executives of the AAP, the Authors Guild and the ABA sent a joint letter to House Antitrust Subcommittee chair Representative David Cicilline regarding the “concentrated power and influence” of Amazon. “The competitive framework of the publishing industry has been fundamentally altered in recent years—and remains at serious risk of further diminishment—because of the Amazon’s concomitant market dominance allows […]

In an August 6 phone conference, attorneys for Barnes & Noble and BN’s former ceo Demos Parneros presented final arguments on the bookseller’s motion for summary judgment dismissing two of the three claims against them before Judge Mary Kay Vyskocil, who replaced John G. Koeltl for unstated reasons in February. The motion, which aims to throw out Parneros’ claims that BN defamed him and failed to act in good faith and fair dealing when they terminated him in July 2018, had been fully briefed when the case was reassigned, and then was delayed by the pandemic. The hour-long conference, conducted […]

The Internet Archive, sued by four AAP member publishers for “willful mass copyright infringement” after creating an open-access “National Emergency Library” of its 1.3 million self-scanned ebooks, has answered the complaint with a request for a jury trial. (In 1998, the Supreme Court ruled that there is a Seventh Amendment right to a trial by jury in copyright infringement suits seeking statutory damages.) Update: We overlooked that the plaintiff publishers had also asked for a jury trial in their original complaint. The answer, filed July 28 in the Southern District of New York, puts forth a number of affirmative defenses […]