James Joyce Estate to Pay $240K Attorney Fee to End Copyright Fight

The long-running copyright dispute between a Stanford University professor and author James Joyce's estate has ended with the estate's agreement to pay $240,000 of the professor's attorney fees.

The estate accused professor Carol Loeb Shloss of infringement when she quoted some of Joyce's papers in her biography of his daughter Lucia.

"I think it's fair to say that professor Shloss and all her counsel are pleased to see an end to this dispute, particularly one that reflects the efforts that the situation required," said attorney Bernard Burk of Howard Rice Nemerovski Canady Falk & Rabkin, who joined members of Stanford Law School's Fair Use Project in representing Shloss.

Burk explained that the Joyce estate repeatedly threatened to sue Shloss if she used material from the author's papers or Lucia's medical records in her 2003 book, "Lucia Joyce: To Dance in the Wake."

Initially, Shloss cut a substantial part of the material from her book in response to the threats.

However, she filed a declaratory judgment action in 2006 in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California to establish her right to publish the excised material.

The case settled in 2007, when the estate agreed to allow publication of the material in the United States.

Shloss asked the District Court to order the estate to pay her more than $400,000 in attorney fees. The court awarded her $326,000 in May, but the estate appealed the order to the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

The Fair Use Project announced Sept. 28 that the estate has dropped its appeal and agreed pay Shloss $240,000.

"I'm really proud of what we accomplished here," Shloss said in a statement. "We vindicated my rights as a scholar, and we also demonstrated that authors and literary estates need to be careful. If they don't pay attention to the rights of scholars, authors and researchers, they may end up paying just as the Joyce estate did."

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