Organizations Rally to Limit Trademark Expansion The Authors Guild has joined with a variety of other organizations (including the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the American Library Association) in alerting members to the potential dangers of the Trademark Dilution Revision Act, which comes before a Senate sub-committee today for hearings. (The House has already passed the legislation last April.) Yet another step in corporate-friendly intellectual property law, the particular concern of the Guild is that the bill as currently written would weaken traditional protections for noncommercial and news reporting usage of trademarks. In other words, simply mentioning trademarks in the text […]

Personnel News Paul Slovak has been promoted from associate publisher to publisher at Viking, overseeing “both the direction and the shape of the list and the execution of the Viking publishing program,” and continuing as an editor for Viking Penguin, Molly Stern has been named editorial director of fiction for Viking (in addition to her current title of executive editor at Viking Penguin) and Wendy Wolf has been named editorial director of non-fiction (also retaining her executive editor title). All three will continue to report to Viking president Clare Ferraro. In another shuffling of the deck at the Random House […]

RH Films Gets Focus Random House Films has selected two properties as the starting point for their film production joint venture with Focus Features. Variety reports that they will begin with Yasmina Khadra’s (a pen name for former Algerian army officer Mohammed Moulessehoul) forthcoming novel THE ATTACK, said to have already sold over 100,000 copies in France, and investigative reporter Bob Drogin’s forthcoming CURVEBALL. John Wells will produce THE ATTACK, which features an Arab surgeon who loses his wife in a suicide bombing. Drogin’s book expands on reporting about US intelligence before the war in Iraq, taking its title from […]

Sheinkman to Curtis Brown UK Follow the recent departures of agents Peter Robinson and Ali Gunn, Curtis Brown UK has completed their wooing of agent Elizabeth Sheinkman, who will join the agency as senior agent and director of the Book Board on March 6. Sheinkman, who has been based in London since 2004, will continue to sell UK rights for her former employer, the Elaine Markson Agency. She will also continue to represent her authors directly in the US and expects to keep building her list of UK authors. In other personnel news, at Lowenstein-Yost Associates Zoe Fishman has been […]

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Gunn Moves, Pack Will Leave, and Other Personnel News and Announcements Another agent has departed from Curtis Brown UK, as Ali Gunn has set up her own agency, Gunn Media Enterprises. Waterstone’s outspoken head buyer Scott Pack made himself into a lightning rod in his short tenure at the bookselling chain though the talk never matched the results at the cash registers, and now he’ll be leaving in six months. He says in a blog posting the departure was his idea: “I simply fancy trying something else so am going to see what is out there. The idea of taking […]