The Federal Bureau of Investigation arrested Filippo Bernardini, a 29-year-old Italian junior rights manager at Simon & Schuster UK, on January 5, 2022, charging him with wire fraud and ‘‘aggravated identity theft.’’ He was apprehended when his flight landed at New York’s JFK airport. Bernardini is allegedly the person behind a series of baffling crimes, in which he impersonated other publishing professionals and set up fake websites in order to ...Read More

New York’s governor Kathy Hochul vetoed a State Assembly bill that would have forced publishers to license ebooks to libraries. She said:

While the goal of this bill is laudable, unfortunately, copyright protection provides the author of a work with the exclusive right to their works. As such, federal law would allow the author, and only the author, to determine to whom they wish to share their work and on ...Read More

The Tolkien Estate took legal action to stop the development of a new cryptocur­rency called “JRR Token.” The cryptocurrency was launched in August 2021 with the slogan “The One Token That Rules Them All”, along with a commercial featuring actor Billy Boyd, who played Pippin in the Lord of the Rings films. The cur­rency’s creator said, “Saruman was trying to unify Middle Earth under centralised rule whereas the fellowship wanted ...Read More

Author Alice Sebold, who wrote fantasy The Lovely Bones (2002), has been in the news recently because a man who went to prison based on her testimony was released and had his conviction overturned. In Sebold’s 1999 memoir Lucky, she described her sexual assault and the trial of alleged perpetrator Anthony J. Broadwater. Broadwater, 61, spent 16 years in prison and was a registered sex offender after his release, ...Read More

Peter S. Beagle and newly formed ownership group SHP, LLC have regained the rights to much of Beagle’s intellectual property in a sale recently approved by the US Bankruptcy Court.

Beagle filed a lawsuit against his former business manage, Connor Cochran, in 2015, winning a total of $332,500 in damages. Related lawsuits against the Avicenna De­velopment Corporation and Conlan Press, Inc., were stayed when Cochran filed Chapter 11 bankruptcy for ...Read More

The law firm of Hagens Berman is suing Amazon and the Big Five publishers in a class-action lawsuit, alleging that the publishers conspired with the online retailer to illegally fix ebook prices. Their initial complaint was filed in the Southern District of New York on January 14, 2021, and only named Amazon as a defen­dant, with Hachette, HarperCollins, Macmillan, Penguin Random House, and Simon & Schuster listed as co-conspirators. The ...Read More

Literary agency Foundry Literary + Media dissolved in September 2020, and some authors had trouble getting paid, with reports of checks bouncing as early as last No­vember The Authors Guild got involved, and some authors were subsequently paid by wire transfer, but others were not. The agency’s found­ers, Yfat Reiss Gendell and Peter McGuigan, split up to form their own separate agencies last year, YRG Partners and Ultra Literary.

Gendell ...Read More

The litigation between Chooseco (which holds the trademark for “Choose Your Own Adventure” books) and Netflix regarding the latter’s interactive movie Black Mirror: Bandersnatch has ended. The two companies informed their judge in November 2020 that they’d reached a settlement, though terms were not disclosed. Chooseco argued that Netflix appropriated their protected imagery and terminology without permission.

While you are here, please take a moment to support Locus with a ...Read More

The European Union’s European Commission is continuing its antitrust investigation of Amazon.com, announcing a “preliminary view that [Amazon] has breached EU antitrust rules.” The Commission alleges that the company engages in “the abuse of a dominant market position,” and that Amazon competes with the third-party sellers hosted on the site unfairly by using proprietary data. The Commission has opened a second investigation into whether Amazon gives illegally unfair treatment to ...Read More

Former B&N CEO Demos Parneros has settled his lawsuit against the company. An agree­ment was reached less than a week before a planned pre-trial conference. The settlement terms were not disclosed, but each party will pay their own court costs and fees. Parneros sued for breach of contract and defamation of character in August 2018, and added additional claims later that year. He was fired on July 3, 2018 for ...Read More

The Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA) and author Alan Dean Foster held a press conference November 18, 2020, claiming that Disney has been withholding payment for Foster’s work on Star Wars and Alien novelizations. According to their press release,

Foster was originally contracted to write the Alien novelizations by Titan Books, and the Star Wars novelizations by Lucasfilm. Both companies regularly paid his royalties. When The Walt ...Read More

Following the announcement of a Netflix series based on Cixin Liu’s The Three-Body Problem, five Republican senators sent a letter objecting to the plans. The senators (Martha McSally of Arizona, Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee, Rick Scott of Florida, Kevin Cramer of North Dakota, and Thom Tillis of North Carolina), are troubled by comments Liu made in a New Yorker interview in 2019 that seemed to defend Chinese treatment of ...Read More

The Internet Archive has demanded a jury trial in the lawsuit brought by four publishers alleging “willful mass copyright infringement” in the form of IA’s “National Emergency Library”, which of­fered unlimited borrows of over a million ebooks. The IA insists that fair use and the first sale doctrine make its actions lawful: “The Internet Archive’s [controlled digital lending] program is sheltered by the fair use doctrine, buttressed by traditional library ...Read More

The estate and family of Richard Adams, as Watership Down Enterprises, have won a lawsuit in the English High Court against film producer Martin Rosen, who wrote and directed a 1978 animated film adaptation of Watership Down. Rosen and his companies were ordered to pay costs ad well as damages of $95,000 for infringement of copyright, contracting unauthorized licensing deals, and withholding royalty payments. The court also terminated the ...Read More

Barnes & Noble has requested a jury trial in the age discrimination lawsuit filed by Barbara Tavres in the US Dis­trict Court in Northern California. Tavres was fired on September 6, 2019 after a career that be­gan in 2006, and claimed Barnes & Noble fired her because of her age, and also used policies, practices, and procedures which disproportion­ately affected employees age 40 and older. She seeks class action status. ...Read More

The legal battle continues over Audible’s planned Captions program, which would display computer-generated text concurrent with audiobook narration. The Authors Guild and the Association of Authors’ Representatives filed a joint amicus brief to support the seven publish­ers who have sued to block the Captions program, saying the “feature presents a significant threat to the rights and livelihoods of authors and their rep­resentatives…. Audible seeks to bypass its glaring infringement of ...Read More

Ed Kramer, co-founder of Dragon Con and convicted child molest­er, is in legal trouble again, this time in a compli­cated computer hacking case that involves various figures in the Georgia legal system. Superior Court judge Kathryn Schrader has been indicted, along with Kramer, a private investigator named TJ Ward, and a former sheriff’s deputy named Frank Karic. Schrader alleges that Gwinnett County district at­torney Danny Porter hacked her computer (which ...Read More