John Bolton’s book THE ROOM WHERE IT HAPPENED has been shipped to warehouses and distribution centers in advance of its June 23 publication date. But deputy White House counsel John Eisenberg claims “the current draft still contains classified material” and says the National Security Council will provide a redacted copy of the manuscript on or before June 19. Bolton’s attorney Charles Cooper writes in the WSJ about the extensive process of review and revision that Bolton went through with Ellen Knight, the NSC’s senior director for prepublication review of materials. By Cooper’s account, on April 27, Knight confirmed to Bolton […]
Legal
Briefs
People Tara Gilbert has joined the Jennifer De Chiara Literary Agency, associate agent. She was previously associate agent at Corvisiero Literary Agency. Amy Giuffrida has also joined as associate agent. She was previously literary agent apprentice at Corvisiero. At Astra Publishing House, Lisa Taylor has joined as production manager (she was at Lonely Planet Kids), and Alisa Trager moves over from Boyds Mills & Kane to serve as managing editor for Astra, working across all group imprints. Founder and publisher of Fig Tree Juliet Annan will leave the imprint at the end of October, as she pursues an MA in English […]
LSC Approved for Full DIP Loan, with June 30 Deadline to Decide on Sale or Restructuring
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 […]
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 — […]