Great news on the James Joyce Estate / Shloss copyright fight
The estate of James Joyce has been accused for years of trying to intimidate Joyce scholars, especially those dealing with issues sensitive to the Joyce family. After English professor Carol Shloss was forced to cut important sections of a new book on Joyce's daughter Lucia because of worries that the estate would sue, she published the extra material on a web site as an "electronic supplement." She then took the Joyce estate to court, hoping to secure a declaratory judgment that certain primary source materials did not infringe on the Joyce copyright. After months of legal maneuvering, the Joyce estate backed down on March 19, and now Shloss wants attorneys' fees from them.
This is great news for anyone interested in a fair and equitable copyright system. In a nutshell, Prof. Shloss quoted James Joyce materials as part of her academic research and the Joyce estate threatened to sue her for unauthorized use of the dead author's writing while publishing her research findings.
I ran into this suit while researching the H.P. Lovecraft copyright situation last year. The shenanigans pulled by the Joyce estate are very similar to those exercised by Arkham House Press throughout the publishing house's history until recent years. In the decades after Lovecraft's death, Arkham House founders August Derleth and Donald Wandrei claimed exclusive control of Lovecraft's writings and when skeptics would ask for proof, the press would refuse to provide any documentation to support their claims. People wishing to publish Lovecraft were faced with a choice: call Arkham House's bluff (and spend the money on the accompanying litigation) or give up republishing HPL's work. What made the HPL situation somewhat absurd was that the Derleth estate claimed control of the materials in public, while strenuously arguing in court that the HPL materials were public domain in order to avoid paying royalties to Derleth's surviving partner. Sliminess all around...
What interests me about the present Joyce case is that like the estate of August Derleth, the estate of James Joyce was abusing its position to squelch legitimate and valid reuses of the contested material. I'm curious how often this occurs and we simply never hear about it.
And as an aside, I do have a whole paper written on the HPL situation. I'm not ready for wide public dissemination, but if you're interested in these kinds of issues, drop me a line and I can send you a link to the current version.
