Last June we sued the Estate of James Joyce to establish the right of Stanford Professor Carol Shloss to use copyrighted materials in connection with her scholarly biography of Lucia Joyce. Shloss suffered more than ten years of threats and intimidation by Stephen James Joyce, who purported to prohibit her from quoting from anything that James or Lucia Joyce ever wrote for any purpose. As a result of these threats, significant portions of source material were deleted from Shloss's book, Lucia Joyce: To Dance In The Wake.
In the lawsuits we filed against the Estate and against Stephen Joyce individually, we asked the Court to remove the threat of liability by declaring Shloss's right to publish those deleted materials on a website designed to supplement the book. After the trying to have the case dismissed for lack of subject matter jurisdiction, the Estate gave up the fight. Joyce and the Estate have now entered into a settlement agreement enforceable by the Court that prohibits them from enforcing any of their copyrights against Shloss in connection with the publication of the supplement, whether in electronic or printed form.
(Via Lessig Blog.)
My name is Stephen James Joyce and I am Irish. I the author of a book entitled 'Teaching an Anthill to Fetch: Developing Collaborative Intelligence @ Work'. Apart from the fact that I share my name with the owner of the James Joyce estate there may be another reason that we have become 'bioentangled'.
ReplyDeleteAlthough I read Joyces' work as a young man I had not kept abreast of the legal wranglings around the use of his work. It was with much amusement that I discovered that by publishing my book under a 'creative commons' licence instead of the the more conventional 'all rights reserved' I had placed myself (unintentionaly) at the opposite end of a debate from my namesake, in the debate about intellectual property. http://tinyurl.com/32ce29
Just thought this was amusing.
Amusing - and another reason to rejoice/rejoyce.
ReplyDeleteYour book looks interesting - and very germane to this blog. I'll add it to my reading list. Thanks for bringing it to my attention.