The two court cases stemming from a planned Broadway theatrical adaptation of Harper Lee’s TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD, filed in two separate jurisdictions, will proceed in the Southern District of New York. A Federal court judge in Alabama ruled Monday that Tonja Carter’s original suit against producer Scott Rudin should transfer to the Southern District of New York, where Rudin’s company, Rudinplay Inc., had filed a countersuit against the Harper Lee Estate. Judge William H. Steele’s 19-page ruling denied Rudinplay’s motion to dismiss on the grounds that jurisdiction in Alabama did not apply.The producer “well knew that it was forming […]
Legal
The Last Gasp: Apple Agrees To Settle Shareholder eBook Complaint
The long-running saga of the Department of Justice vs. Apple over antitrust issues with ebook pricing had one last gasp. Two years after Apple paid out more than $450 million in settlement credits in the original case (which was settled two years prior, in 2014), the company has settled a subsequent derivative shareholder complaint, originally lodged one month after the 2014 settlement was finalized. That agreement primarily requires Apple to continue a variety of antitrust training and compliance processes that the company had initially (and unsuccessfully) resisted from the government. Apple will comply with an antitrust monitor through 2022; modify […]
Legal: Writers Will Receive Money From Class Action Suit, 17 Years Later; Mockingbird Suits Continue In Two Places
It took only 17 years, but finally, the Literary Works in Electronic Databases Copyright Litigation has culminated this week with the issuance of settlement checks to nearly 2,500 freelance journalists totaling $9.5 million. The class action lawsuit, launched in 2001, claimed copyright infringement when about 600,000 newspaper articles were licensed to databases without the writers’ prior knowledge or permission. “We’ve been at the finish line for this lawsuit for a very long time, and so it is great that it’s finally happening,” Authors Guild president (and one of the named plaintiffs) James Gleick told the NYT. “But it’s also certainly a […]
Regan Says HarperCollins Would Not Allow Janice Dickinson to Accuse Bill Cosby of Rape In Memoir
Publisher Judith Regan testified in the retrial of Bill Cosby on sexual-assault charges in Norristown, PA on Wednesday, supporting Janice Dickinson’s account that she had long claimed Cosby raped her, even though that’s not what her 2002 memoir No Lifeguard on Duty said. “I remember at one point she [Dickinson] told me she’d been raped by Mr. Cosby, drugged and raped, and she wanted to include that in the book,” Regan said on the stand. “And at that time I told her…after conversations with the legal department, without corroboration those sorts of stories would be impossible to publish because of […]
Former Perseus Executives Sue to Collect Sale Bonuses
In mid-March, the three top former executives of the Perseus Books Group — ceo David Steinberger, cfo Charles Gallagher and cmo Rick Joyce — sued Perseus Books, LLC and Centre Lane Partners, the private equity company that had owned the publisher, in New York State Supreme Court. They are seeking payment of additional stay bonuses and membership share interests due that were to be based on the final “net sale proceeds” from the spring 2016 sales of Perseus Books to Hachette Book Group, and Perseus Distribution to Ingram Content Group. The case is before Judge Barry Ostrager, who had presided […]
Rudin Countersues Lee Estate, Wants to Perform Mockingbird for the Court
Scott Rudin’s production company Rudinplay has countersued the estate of Harper Lee and its representative Tonja Carter in a New York Federal Court, as part of their response to the lawsuit filed against Rudin in March in an Alabama Federal Court looking for a judgment that the planned Broadway adaptation of To Kill A Mockingbird departs from the spirit of the novel and alters two its characters, in violation of the license. Rudin’s lawsuit seeks to move the jurisdiction to New York, whose law governs the licensing contract, and asks for “an expedited determination” that the play does not violate […]