Legal

Attorneys for Milo Yiannopoulos responded to Simon & Schuster’s motion to dismiss his lawsuit against the publisher with a revised version of the original complaint. Most relevantly, the new reply pokes at S&S’s contention that after serving their termination letter, the author “accepted the [signing advance] payment without protest, thereby sealing the accord and satisfaction and barring this lawsuit as a matter of centuries-old law.” Yiannopoulos notes the payment was accepted on or about January 18, when “there was no existing dispute between the parties” and could not “be deemed to be in ‘satisfaction’ of any dispute because none then existed.” No new […]

It will come as no great surprise that publishers Penguin Random House and Simon & Schuster, along with the estates of Truman Capote, Jack Kerouac, Arthur C. Clarke, and Ernest Hemingway, prevailed in their copyright infringement case brought against Fredrik Colting and Melissa Medina for their KinderGuides books, asserted as “early learning guides” to classic works of literature. On Friday, NY Southern District Federal Judge Jed Rakoff granted summary judgment on all nine counts of copyright infringement, and rejected the defendants’ claim of fair use “as a matter of law.” Somewhat unusually, Judge Rakoff issued a two-page ruling, with “a memorandum […]

Simon & Schuster filed a reply to Milo Yiannopoulos’s breach of contract lawsuit on Friday, telling the court that they terminated his contract “within the unambiguous terms of the publishing agreement” and arguing that by not returning the $80,000 advance paid in January, Milo was agreeing to and accepting their termination. If not, the publisher argues, then under the contract the rights to Milo’s book have not yet reverted to him. By their account, “On February 22, 2017, Simon & Schuster exercised its contractual rights, terminated the agreement, and allowed Yiannopoulos to retain an $80,000 advance that he would otherwise […]

As promised and boasted, Milo Yiannopoulos filed suit against Simon & Schuster in New York Supreme Court on Friday, alleging “willful and opportunistic breach of its contract.” He says in the filing that the publisher “wrongfully, and in bad faith, terminated the contract with Yiannopoulos in violation of its terms and cancelled Dangerous under pressure from authors, bookselling accounts, business and special-interest groups, celebrities, and various other self-appointed censors who disagreed with views expressed by Yiannopoulos.” The suit seeks minimum damages of $10 million. He claims in the suit that the cancellation of his book contract “caused irreparable harm to […]

On Tuesday, a Federal court for the Southern District of New York entered a default judgment in favor of Elsevier in their infringement suit against Sci-Hub, the Library Genesis Project, and other websites, accused of “compromising some 51 million protected works.” The court award the maximum damages of $15 million, and made permanent a 2015 preliminary injunction requiring the suspension of the defendants U.S.-administered domain names. Separately, also on Tuesday in the same jurisdiction, Cengage, McGraw-Hill and Pearson filed suit against Follett, charging the college bookstore operator with knowingly “trafficking in counterfeit textbooks” at scale. They allege that, “Defendants regularly look to unknown […]