James Joyce copyright battle
p2pnet.net news:- Stanford University’s Carol Shloss (right) has won the right to publish her scholarship on the literary work of James Joyce online and in print.
Shloss, an acting professor of English, sued the James Joyce estate for refusing to allow her to use copyrighted Joycean material on her web site.
The estate claimed she’d be infringing on its ownership of Joyce’s image by quoting his published works, manuscripts and private letters.
Shloss v Estate of James Joyce was filed in 2006 on the eve of Bloomsday, the annual Joyce celebration on June 16 to memorialize the day Leopold Bloom, the main character in Joyce’s Ulysses, made his walk through Dublin, says a Stanford statement.
“Relying on many primary sources, Shloss’s work focuses on the life of Lucia Joyce,n her unacknowledged artistic talent, her tragic life spent mostly in mental institutions, and the unrecognized influence she exerted over her father’s work,” says a Stanford statement, going on:
“Upon learning of Shloss’s scholarship, the Joyce Estate – controlled by Joyce’s grandson Stephen James Joyce – denied her permission to quote from any of the materials the Joyce Estate controlled and repeatedly threatened Shloss with a copyright infringement suit.”
The Fair Use Project and Cyberlaw Clinic filed a lawsuit on behalf of Shloss in June 2006, asking a federal court to find that she has the right to use quotations from published and unpublished material relating to James and Lucia Joyce on a scholarly website.
Stephen James Joyce and the Joyce Estate entered into a settlement agreement, “enforceable by the court” that lets Shloss publish this material electronically and also publish a printed supplement to her book ‘Lucia Joyce: To Dance in the Wake’.
“The work of literary scholars is inherently transformative,” says Shloss. “We take the writing of someone whose work we love and share it with others. We keep our human inheritance alive by making it part of a dialog with our peers, our friends, our students and the generations that follow us. When that dialog is interrupted, when we are squeezed between the aggression of literary estates and the apprehensions of publishers, something very important is lost.
“I fought not just for Lucia and Joyce, whose words had to be taken out of my book, but for the freedom to consider what happened to them and for the freedom of others to respond to my ideas. ‘Fair use’ exists to foster this liveliness of mind; its measure is in transformation not in a restrictive counting of words. Everyone who worked on this case understood that something far more important than my particular book was at stake in the fight. It was an honor to work with them.”
Also See:
sued – James Joyce web use wrangle, June 14, 2006
statement – Stanford Scholar Wins Right to Publish Joyce Material in Copyright Suit Led by Stanford Law School’s Fair Use Project, March 22, 2007
If your Net access is blocked by government restrictions, try Psiphon from the Citizen Lab at thIs the end (of the Net) nigh?zze University of Toronto’s Munk Centre for International Studies. Go here for the official download, here for the p2pnet download, and here for details. And if you’re Chinese and you’re looking for a way to access independent Internet news sources, try Freegate, the DIT program written to help Chinese citizens circumvent web site blocking outside of China. Download it here.
rss feed: http://p2pnet.net/p2p.rss | | Mobile – http://p2pnet.net/index-wml.php | | And use free p2pnet newsfeeds for your site
Tired of being treated like a criminal? They depend on you, not the other way around. Don’t buy their ‘product’. Do bug your local politicians. Use emails, snail-mail, phone calls, faxes, IM, stop them in the street, blog. And if you’re into organizing, organize petitions, organize demonstrations and then turn up on your local political rep’s doorstep, making sure you’ve contacted your local tv/radio station/newspaper in advance. Don’t just complain. Do something!
March 24th, 2007 at 9:39 am
This is a good example of how copyright laws and claims limit and sometimes destroy culture.
As it is it is impossible to write a story or makes a movie about a recently dead author. Imagina e biograpgy movie about the great songwriter, Irving Berling, without any of his music in the movie?
Perhaps no movie of Irving Berlin has been made because his mussic, even if composed 75 years ago, cannot be used because of unrealistic copyright duration terms and copyright abuse by copyright holders.
It’s time to rethink copyright laws.
While this time reason prevailed, the next time aroud an author who would like to write about another author will decide not to write because of the hazzle and risks of being sued.
Rafael Venegas
http://www.gvenegas.com