Copyright resources

Hi, Katie.

And if you want a "scholarly-ish" article about the Joyce kerfuffle, this article was super interesting!

Spoo, Robert E. “Archival Foreclosure: A Scholar’s Lawsuit Against the Estate of James Joyce.” American Archivist 71, no. 2 (Winter 2008): 544–551.

Man, what that family was willing to do to protect the privacy of one of its members and how they misused copyright to do it! That seems like its certainly one of the issues about literary copyright...the "legacy" of these famous writer types looms so much larger than for ordinary schmoes like me. The families become sort of rabid about protecting that legacy, whether through copyright litigation or privacy restrictions.

Thanks for the suggestion Chelsea! I just downloaded the article.

Somehow "kerfuffle" seems like an appropriate word to use talking about Joyce:) In defense of his family, there are A LOT of Joyceans out there and, given that he didn't publish very many books, yet so much has been written about them, I can imagine how hungry and persistent Joyce scholars are for more to work with. Of course, I still need to read up on all this kerfuffle. I'm curious if it was about the money or about protecting his legacy.

Katie

Hey, Katie

In this case, and also in the J.D. Salinger case, which was apparently a big deal in the 1990s (I think), it's really about protecting legacy or privacy. So, it's actually a little bizarre because in those particular cases, copyright is just being used as an excuse (more or less) for restricting scholarly publishing on what authors or families of authors might deem to be private or sensitive topics. In the article I recommended, the kerfuffle wasn't even about James Joyce, but about another member of the Joyce family.

This sort of ties back to the issue of living authors (or living family of dead authors) jeopardizing the evidentiary value of archives, which you mentioned above. If you wanted to have a little section about the challenges around managing literary archives, you could include something about this (the nature of the artist / public figure wanting to present a particular view to the public), as well as perhaps something about the inflated cost of acquiring the fonds of literary superstars.