As a result of an earlier settlement reached in 2007, consulting English
Professor Carol Loeb Shloss already had achieved the right to domestic
online publication of the supportive scholarship the Joyce Estate had
forced her to remove from Lucia Joyce: To Dance in the Wake (2003). She
also had achieved the right to republish the book in the United States
with the expurgated material restored. After that settlement was
reached, Shloss asked the court to award the attorneys' fees and costs
she had incurred in bringing her suit, and the court granted that
request. The parties eventually settled the amount of the fees and
litigation costs Shloss and her counsel were to receive at $240,000.
Shloss' suit was championed by the Stanford Law School Center for
Internet and Society's Fair Use Project, with the assistance of
attorneys from Howard Rice Nemerovski Canady Falk & Rabkin and Keker &
Van Nest of San Francisco, and Doerner, Saunders, Daniel & Anderson of
Tulsa, Okla.
The estate of the celebrated Irish author of Ulysses and Finnegans Wake,
under the guidance of Joyce's grandson, Stephen James Joyce, had become
notorious in scholarly circles for its conflicts with scholars, authors
and Joyce enthusiasts. The estate's history of suits and threats of suit
has been the subject of many articles.
L.A. Cicero
[](http://news.stanford.edu/news/2009/september28/gifs/shloss_news.jpg "Stanford scholar Carol Shloss")
Stanford scholar Carol Shloss
Stephen Joyce has stopped countless public readings of his grandfather's
works and discouraged a generation of research. At one point, he told a
prominent Joyce scholar that he was no longer giving permission to quote
from any of Joyce's work. He told one performer, who had simply
memorized a portion of Finnegans Wake for an onstage presentation, that
he had probably "already infringed" on the estate's copyright, according
to a 2006 New Yorker story. (The performer later discovered that Joyce
did not have the right to block his performance.) Shloss herself recalls
a conference where a scholar had Joyce's words projected on a screen
rather than risk pronouncing the words in a recorded session.
"It's a breakthrough, not just for me but for everybody who has to deal
with a literary estate," said Shloss. "This has been going on for
decades. Scholars are not wealthy people. We don't have easy access to
the legal system to determine and vindicate our rights if someone
threatens us with a lawsuit. You just have to give in.
"When the Stanford Law School took this on, Larry Lessig \[now at
Harvard University\] said, 'That's disgusting,' and the tables turned.
Suddenly scholars had some legal support for an issue that had been
stifling our lives for decades."
Shloss said that the suit is a game-changer because now literary
"estates know they can get hurt."
"They know that scholars have resources now. They just can't be
bullies," she said. "We've established that if you don't pay attention
to the rights of scholars, authors and researchers the copyright laws
protect, you might have to pay something as the Joyce Estate has had to
pay."
In a tartly worded Feb. 24 filing to determine attorneys' fees and
costs, Shloss and her legal team argued that "the cost of litigating
this case, which was substantial, was a direct result of the Estate's
assiduous and energetic efforts to prevent Shloss from exercising the
rights the U.S. copyright laws encourage, and its 'scorched earth'
approach to litigating the early stages of the case to see if it could
bully Shloss into capitulation."
Shloss began researching her book in 1988. During a visit to Stephen
Joyce's Paris home that year, the writer's grandson warned her of his
determination to protect what he considered the Joyce family's privacy
rights. After studying the 50 unpublished notebooks that the author used
to write Finnegans Wake, Shloss challenged the long-accepted image of
Lucia Joyce, who was institutionalized in mental asylums for decades, as
the schizophrenic daughter of a man of genius. Instead, Shloss saw the
young dancer as a creative, independent figure who was an inspiration
for her father's work.
In subsequent years, according to a 2006 court filing, the author's
grandson and the estate's trustee made "attempts to interfere with
Shloss' research, to stop publication of her book, to damage her
relationship with her employer, and to misuse the copyrights they
control."
Photo by C. Ruf, Zurich, ca. 1918 Source: Cornell Joyce Collection
