A federal judge in Florida has urged the Escambia County School Board to settle a book-banning case brought by PEN, PRH, and others, mindful that it has cost local taxpayers hundreds of thousands of dollars. As of last September, the school board had already spent more than $440,000 on attorneys’ fees. District Judge T. Kent Wetherell II wrote in the footnote of a court order that a settlement, “should be particularly important to (the school board) because it is spending taxpayer money to defend this suit and it could end up having to pay all or part of Plaintiffs’ attorney’s […]
Legal
2024: The Year In Legal News
This year legal themes were almost all holdovers from the battles being fought in 2023. In one significant final chapter, the Association of American Publishers prevailed over the Internet Archive—again. In September, the Second Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the finding that held IA guilty of “wholesale and unauthorized copying” and the illegal files started coming down. That decision became final in December, as the deadline for IA to file a cert petition with the Supreme Court passed. The IA will now make an unspecified monetary judgment payment to the organization. Book bans were once again—and will likely continue to […]
Preparing for Public Domain Day 2025
A standard year-end feature, various organizations are starting to make lists of notable works entering the public domain on January 1, 2025. Notable books coming out of copyright include: A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway; The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner; A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf; Tarzan and the Lost Empire by Edgar Rice Burroughs; Red Harvest by Dashiell Hammett; Ellery Queen’s first mystery The Roman Hat Mystery; The Crime at Black Dudley by Margery Allingham; the first English translation of All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque; and more. […]
Final Judgement: AAP’s Victory Over Internet Archive Becomes Permanent, and Now They’ll Get Paid
The AAP (Association of American Publishers) prevailed over the Internet Archive’s mass infringement of books twice: First in District Court in March 2023, and then again before the Court of Appeals in September 2024. December 3 was the last day in which the Internet Archive could have filed a cert petition with the Supreme Court and they did not do so — which means the previous rulings are now final. The AAP says in a statement, “We are pleased that the Second Circuit’s September 4, 2024 opinion stands as the eloquent legal ending to this case, as it draws extensively […]
Court Certifies Class In Scribe Media Case
The US Court for the District of Texas Austin Division has certified the class in the class action suit against Scribe Media and its successor. Former employees sued the publisher for failing to comply with the WARN Act’s notice requirement when it terminated 90 its employees in 2023. Judge Dustin Howell certified the class as defined as “[a]ll former Scribe employees throughout the United States who were terminated as a result of a ‘mass layoff,’ as defined by the WARN Act, without 60 days advance written notice, beginning on May 24, 2023.” This means that it includes any employees who […]
Trump Tapes Case Has Been Quiet
Responding to some of the damaging revelations reported to be included in Bob Woodward’s forthcoming WAR, an emailed statement from Trump campaign communications director Steven Cheung included this remark: “Woodward is an angry little man and is clearly upset because President Trump is successfully suing him because of the unauthorized publishing of recordings he made previously.” Trump first filed suit against Woodward and Simon & Schuster in January 2023. But no determination of “success” has been made. The action was moved to the Southern District of New York in August 2023. Notably, though the defendants’ motion to dismiss was fully […]