LSC Communications has until the end of the month to make a formal decision on whether to plan to exit chapter 11 through a sale or a restructuring, a deadline that’s part of the terms of a $100 million DIP financing package approved by US Bankruptcy Judge Sean Lane at a June 1 hearing. That allows LSC to draw down the remaining $27.5 million of the financing. The final terms of the financing agreement included an automatic 90-day maturity extension if the company chooses to restructure, and eliminated a requirement that potential buyers be willing to assume the prepetition revolving […]
Legal
Judge Throws Out Lenny Dykstra’s Defamation Suit
A New York Supreme Court judge dismissed former NY Mets player Lenny Dykstra’s defamation and libel lawsuit against Ron Darling, ruling that Dykstra’s “reputation for unsportsmanlike conduct and bigotry is already so tarnished that it cannot be further injured.” Dykstra claimed that Darling owed him monetary, compensatory, and punitive damages for writing in his book 108 Stitches that Dykstra had shouted “every imaginable and unimaginable insult and expletive …. foul, racist, hateful, hurtful stuff” at Red Sox pitcher Dennis Boyd while he was warming up for Game 3 of the 1986 World Series, which Boston went on to lose. In […]
AAP Hails 50th Anniversary, Remembers Reidy, Reaffirms Broad Support for Internet Archive Lawsuit
Hours after a lawsuit coordinated among four large AAP members was filed to block the Internet Archive’s broad scanning and online sharing of copyrighted books, the organization convened a virtual version of their annual meeting and marked the group’s 50th anniversary. Current AAP chair (and Macmillan ceo) John Sargent remarked, “It is remarkable how much we work together and how how very close we are in our view of the right way forward across this organization.” More broadly, on the AAP’s big anniversary, he noted, “It’s fair to say that without the AAP the United States copyright law would not […]
Four AAP Publishers Sue the Internet Archive to Block “Mass Copyright Infringement”
When the Internet Archive granted to itself in late March emergency powers to make a collection of 1.3 million self-scanned ebooks available for unlimited downloading around the world during the pandemic, it dared — or invited — publishers and authors to sue. This morning, AAP member publishers Hachette Book Group, HarperCollins, Penguin Random House and Wiley have indeed sued the Internet Archive for “willful mass copyright infringement” in the Federal Court for the Southern District of New York. As the AAP says in a press release announcing the suit, “The sheer scale of IA’s infringement described in the complaint — […]
Endeavor Looks to Raise More Capital, Judge Pares Screenwriters’ Suit, and More
As Endeavor starts informing roughly a third of its staff about who is fired, furloughed and/or set for working half-time, the company is also looking to raise another $250 million in financing to help it through the pandemic, the NY Post reports. In the meantime, Moody’s joined S&P Global Ratings in downgrading Endeavor’s considerable debt load to “negative” since their “liquidity position is projected to deteriorate until the impact of the coronavirus subsides.” In other agency news, California US District Court Judge Andre Birotte Jr. dismissed some of the Writers Guild antitrust claims against the big Hollywood agencies in the […]
Ninth Circuit Appeals Court to Review Fair Use In Star Trek-Seuss Mashup; Supreme Court Invalidates Copyright On Legal Annotations
Dr. Seuss Enterprises has now argued before a Federal Ninth Circuit Appeals Court its claim that a Star-Trek themed version of graduation-gift favorite Oh, the Places You’ll Go! violates its copyright. Last year, U.S. District Judge Janis Sammartino had ruled that ComicMix’s Oh, the Places You’ll Boldly Go was fair use. Attorneys from DLA Piper argued the Star Trek book is attempting to serve as a market substitute for the original work, and that previous mash-ups of Seuss’ books, such as the Jim Henson puppet television series “The Wubbulous World of Dr. Seuss,” have been licensed. ComicMix alleges its book […]