Skip to main content

The Outer Limits. . . .of Copyright. Part 1

By

Bloomsday (June 16th) has passed, but I would assume that among James Joyce scholars and devotees the celebrating continues. Bloomsday is the annual celebration of the day-in-the life of Leopold Bloom immortalized in James Joyce’s novel Ulysses. Lovers of James Joyce are still celebrating because Ulysses and the other work published during Joyce’s life have been free from copyright protection since January 1, 2012. Still celebrating six months later? After what they had to deal with regarding the estate of James Joyce they may be celebrating this liberation for many years to come. Allow me to explain.

James Joyce died in 1941. Joyce’s estate, which controlled the copyrights to his published works traded hands until it ended up in the control of his grandson Stephen James Joyce (he like using his full name).  Works protected by copyright cannot be reprinted unless permission is granted by the copyright holder, and permissions are often granted, for a fee. When the persons requesting use are academics the fee involved is often nominal. Not with Stephen James Joyce at the helm of the Joyce estate. Stephen made the academic’s job of writing about James Joyce hell. Gordon Bowker referred to it as “Literature’s most tyrannical estate” in a piece appearing on the Daily Beast web site. In an attempt to prevent publication and protect the personal life of his grandfather, Stephen has sued, or threatened to sue numerous scholars, performers (including singer Kate Bush), and even the National Library of Ireland. The scholarly books that did not get published would fill library shelves. Publishers, writers, and all sorts of artists were scared off by lawsuits or the threat of lawsuits. The Joyce Studies Annual ceased publication due to Stephen James Joyce. Professor Robert Spoo of the University of Tulsa Law School quit editing the James Joyce Quarterly and went to law school to become, yes, a copyright lawyer. 

With the published works of James Joyce moving into the public domain Stephen James Joyce no longer wields the power he once had. However, there are still questions that swirl around James Joyce’s unpublished works and manuscripts. Stephen James Joyce’s vigorous and aggressive defense of his grandfather’s works is understandable; Lawrence Lessig has said that “Stephen Joyce is using whatever power he has.” (It is worth noting that Lessig and Joyce tangled in litigation. See Schloss v. Sweeney, 515 F. Supp. 2d 1083 (N.D. Cal. 2007)). 

The effects of our copyright system often manifest themselves in the most unlikely places. The matter of James Joyce’s literary estate is a good example of this. 

We now return you to your normally scheduled programming.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Amazing, but True, Deportation Story of Carlos Marcello

By
Earlier this week, the University of Houston Law Center was fortunate to have as its guest Professor Daniel Kanstroom of Boston College of Law. An expert in immigration law, he is the Director of the International Human Rights Program, and he both founded and directs the Boston College Immigration and Asylum Clinic. Speaking as the guest of the Houston Journal of International Law’s annual Fall Lecture Series, Professor Kanstroom discussed issues raised in his new book, Aftermath: Deportation Law and the New American Diaspora . Professor Michael Olivas introduced Professor Kanstroom to the audience, and mentioned the fascinating tale of Carlos Marcello, which Professor Kanstroom wrote about in his chapter “The Long, Complex, and Futile Deportation Saga of Carlos Marcello,” in Immigration Stories , a collection of narratives about leading immigration law cases. My interest piqued, I read and was amazed by Kanstroom’s description of one of the most interesting figures in American le...
1 comment
Read more

Texas Subsequent History Table Ceases Publication

By
This week, Thomson Reuters notified subscribers that publication of the Texas Subsequent History Table will be discontinued and no further updates will be produced, due to “insufficient market interest.” Practitioners have been extracting writ (and since 1997, petition) history from the tables since their initial publication in 1917 as The Complete Texas Writs of Error Table . The tables, later published by West, have been used for nearly a century to determine how the Texas Supreme Court or Court of Criminal Appeals disposed of an appeal from an intermediate appellate court. The purpose of adding this notation to citations is to indicate the effect of the Texas Supreme Court’s action on the weight of authority of the Court of Appeals’ opinion.  For example, practitioners may prefer to use as authority a case that the Texas Supreme Court has determined is correct both in result and legal principles applied (petition refused), rather than one that simply presents no error that requ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Lessons for Today from the Genocide Against the Tutsi in Rwanda

By Anonymous
“Man’s inhumanity to man is not only perpetrated by the vitriolic actions of those who are bad. It is also perpetrated by the vitiating inaction of those who are good.” –Martin Luther King Jr.   Last week, I had the pleasure of attending  Professor Zachary D. Kaufman ’s presentation on  Lessons for Today from the Genocide Against the Tutsi in Rwanda  hosted by the  Johannesburg Holocaust & Geno cide Ce ntre . Among the many takeaways highlighted by Professor Kaufman and drawn from  Lessons from Rwanda: Post-Genocide Law and Policy   were ten simple yet profound lessons:   Lesson #1: Hate speech is dangerous.   To illustrate the role that hate speech played in the Rwandan genocide, Professor Kaufman discussed multiple forms of  propaganda , such as Kangura, Radio Rwanda, and RTLM “hate radio.”   He concludes that we must have limits, including with respect to social media, and further asserts that social media must do a better jo...
Post a Comment
Read more