Earlier this month District Court Judge William H. Pauley III granted preliminary approval to a settlement of the class action suit brought by authors against Harlequin, seeking additional payment for books for which Harlequin licensed ebook rights to its own subsidiaries. A fairness hearing has been scheduled for June 30. (Exclusions and objections must be postmarked by June 6.) The settlement provides for a fund of $4.1 million — minus approximately $1.05 million for attorneys’ fees and related costs — to be divided among qualifying authors with contracts signed between 1990 and 2004. It applies to authors whose books were published […]
Legal
Supreme Court Will Not Hear Authors Guild’s Appeal of Google Books Case
After at least three strikes (or more, depending upon how you count), the Authors Guild’s decade-long case accusing Google of copyright infringement in their library book-scanning program has come to an end. In their conference last Friday, the Supreme Court denied the Guild’s petition for a writ of certiorari. That leaves standing District Court Judge Denny Chin’s original and unequivocal 2013 ruling that Google’s scanning qualified as “fair use.” Judge Chin’s finding was unanimously upheld by a three-judge Second Circuit Court of Appeals panel in 2015. The Authors Guild first brought their suit in September 2005. The AAP followed with their own […]
Back to Court: Authors Guild Petition Rescheduled for April 15
The Supreme Court finally updated the docket entry for the Authors Guild’s request to have their appeal of the Google Books case heard by the high court. After skipping the petition in the April 1 Conference, the Court is once again due to consider the Guild’s case as their next Conference, on April 15. (We will find out at 9:30 AM on Monday, April 18 if they made a decision or defer it to another date.)
Legal: No News on Authors Guild Appeal, As Publishers Mostly Lose Again V. Georgia State University
The Supreme Court was supposed to consider the Authors Guild’s petition to have the high court hear their appeal of the Google Books scanning case at last Friday’s Conference — but when orders from that Conference were announced on Monday morning, the Guild’s case was not on the list. Presumably, that means consideration was postponed to the Court’s next Conference, on April 15, though there is no official update to the case docket yet. In a separate, long-running case, Eleventh Circuit District Judge Orinda Evans once again found mostly in favor of Georgia State University over a group of academic publishers […]
11 Years Later, Authors Guild’s Last Appeal Has April Fool’s Hearing
The Authors Guild’s petition to have the Supreme Court hear their appeal of the copyright infringement case first filed against Google’s scanning of library books in 2005 will be reviewed at the court’s conference on April 1. If you have any need to reacquaint yourself with the issues, the docket entry for the petition for cert. filed on December 31, 2015 is here — and the Court of Appeals unanimous verdict upholding (former) District Court Judge Denny Chin’s original and unequivocal ruling that Google’s scanning qualified as “fair use” is here.
Mockingbird Mass Market Reversion Was Set In Motion In 2011
Despite last week’s suggestion by the New Republic that the termination of Hachette Book Group’s mass market license for To Kill a Mockingbird was a confusing “first action” of Harper Lee’s estate following her death, the process was set in motion 5 years ago and has been hidden in plain sight at least since 2013. Per the copyright law provision that allows the reversion of rights upon request for pre-1978 works after 56 years from the original issuing of the copyright, in April 2011 Lee filed a notice of termination with Hachette Book Group, HarperCollins and San Val, which publishes a school & library edition […]