D.T. Max quotes Steven James Joyce:
“We have proven that we are willing to take any necessary action to back and enforce what we legitimately believe in.” Or, as he put it to me during two phone calls that he recently made to me from La Flotte, “What other literary estate stands up the way I do? It’s a whole way of looking at things and looking at life.”
. . . Stephen said that Joyce’s genius could be found in his several books. (His own library of Joyceana, he once told Le Monde, “is less than a metre wide.”) He did not see what the two hundred and sixty-one works of criticism in the catalogue of the Library of Congress, say, could add to this legacy. Academics, he said at one point, are “people who want to brand this great work with their mark. I don’t accept that.”
. . . Academics, he declared, were like “rats and lice—they should be exterminated!”
Though the much trumpeted “settlement” by the Joyce estate seems like a victory for fair use, ultimately it seems that scholars are the proud owners of a newly refurbished semi-public closet:
As part of an agreement reached this week, the Joyce estate said it would not sue scholar Carol Schloss for copyright infringement if the books, manuscripts and other documents she wants to cite both in print on a Web site were only made available in the United States.
“Our client got exactly what she asked for in her complaint, and more,” said Anthony Falzone, who directs the Fair Use Project at Stanford’s Law School.
. . . Nelson also noted that the estate granted only Schloss permission to quote the materials under limited circumstances, meaning neither she nor other scholars would be permitted to use them outside the scope outlined in the settlement agreement.
Shloss plans to create an appendix to her book both in printed form and by posting the material on a members-only Web site accessible only to users in the United States.
A members-only website and a limited distribution book are the only “fair” uses? It sounds a lot like a “don’t ask—don’t tell” victory to me.
