
Stanford scholar gets six-figure settlement from James Joyce Estate (2009) - walterbell
https://news.stanford.edu/news/2009/september28/shloss-joyce-settlement-092809.html
======
iokevins
Summary: According to Stanford University's account, Lawrence Lessig (then
Stanford, now Harvard) helped lead Stanford's lawyers to victory over Joyce's
grandson's lawyers in a fair use case, letting an English professor publish
certain Joyce-related materials in the USA only...this article represents the
coda of the legal argument, with the English professor getting $240,000 in
legal fees reimbursed.

~~~
codingdave
That is a summary of the facts, but misses the bigger point. The Joyce estate
had a history of being legal bullies. Someone stood up to them, and won their
case, setting a precedent that not only is legal bullying not going to work,
but can backfire to the tune of a quarter million dollars. It is a win not
just for one scholar, but for all of academia.

~~~
logicallee
This article misses the point. Someone needs to call out, by name, the lawyer,
laywers, law firm, or law firms who hoodwinked Joyce's estate into doing this.

some author's grandson isn't going to have such notions. I have a very strong
prior (99%?) that this is just some lawyer(s) milking a famous writer's
estate. Of course it's easy for them to trick the grandchildren - who don't
have any legal training. This is wrong and should be called out specifically.
(obviously be prepared for a fraudulent defamation lawsuit by the same, if you
do it under your own name - hell, there's a chance those bad, corrupt, lawyers
would follow me into this Hacker News thread, a chance I weighed before
posting and found acceptable as I have no relation to the case or the estate
and did not even take the time to find them by name. But I am fairly certain
that if I did the research, I would find what I surmise in this comment.
Really, nobody does this.)

~~~
matthewn
There's no hoodwinking. The grandson is the problem, and has been for a long
time. I've met scholars who've been personally confronted by him at
conferences. It's his personal crusade.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_James_Joyce](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_James_Joyce)

~~~
mistersquid
The Wikipedia entry explains that much of Stephen James Joyce's efforts to
silence academics relates to his aunt, Lucia.

    
    
      > In 2004, Stephen Joyce threatened legal action against the
      > Irish government when the Rejoyce Dublin 2004 festival
      > proposed public reading of excerpts of Ulysses on
      > Bloomsday. In 1988 he destroyed a collection of letters
      > written by Lucia Joyce, his aunt. In 1989 he forced
      > Brenda Maddox to delete a postscript concerning Lucia from
      > her biography Nora: The Real Life of Molly Bloom. After
      > 1995 he announced no permissions would be granted to quote
      > from his grandfather's work. Libraries holding letters by
      > James Joyce were unable to show them without permission.
      > Versions of his work online were disallowed. Stephen
      > Joyce claimed to be protecting his grandfather's and his
      > family's reputation, but would sometimes grant permission to
      > use material in exchange for fees that were often
      > "extortionate".
    

It's been more than 20 years since I've studied James Joyce's work in an
academic setting, but I remember very clearly the family controversies
surrounding James Joyce's wife, Nora, and their daughter, Lucia. The only
thing I feel can safely be asserted about Lucia is that she suffered from
mental illness, usually understood as schizophrenia.

There are also rumors that Lucia shared a bed with her mother and father well
past puberty. Such rumors gain strength given that James Joyce's erotic
behaviors (documented in his letters to Nora and elsewhere) are considered by
many to be fetishistic at best and depraved at worst (coprophilia, for one
example).

In 2004, Michael Hastings published an article in _The Irish Times_ about his
writing a play about Lucia Joyce. [0] In that article, Hastings writes about
the troubling hint of incestuous intimacy between the father-daughter
relationship that sits at the heart of Joyce's avant garde masterpiece
_Finnegans Wake_.

    
    
      > [In _Finnegans Wake_] is a hint of intimacy between father and daughter here
      > that borders on incest. Lucia once remarked to her father
      > that no matter how many loves she had, she could never be
      > unfaithful to him.
      > 
      > Even today among Joyceans this subject remains taboo.
      > Regarding Lucia, academics have toed the Joyce party line -
      > that she suffered fits, had uncontrollable sexual urges, and
      > endlessly shouted forensic sexual details with involuntary
      > abandon. For the sake of being allowed to quote from Joyce's
      > papers, writers have repeatedly cast Lucia as the "problem",
      > just as James and Nora always did. In effect, Lucia has been
      > vaporised from history; memories of her obliterated. She is
      > a "vanished woman".
    

Given these details, one can understand the intensity of Stephen Joyce's
efforts to restrict research surrounding the life of his family, even if one
disagrees with the execution of such efforts. As James Joyce's sole surviving
descendant, Stephen Joyce may well have decided that squelching such academic
and biographical speculation is preferable to seeing traumatic personal
details of his family and his most renowned ancestor exposed for all the world
to see.

[0] [https://www.irishtimes.com/news/the-life-and-loves-of-
lucia-...](https://www.irishtimes.com/news/the-life-and-loves-of-
lucia-1.1134416)

~~~
Stratoscope
Mobile friendly quotes:

> In 2004, Stephen Joyce threatened legal action against the Irish government
> when the Rejoyce Dublin 2004 festival proposed public reading of excerpts of
> Ulysses on Bloomsday. In 1988 he destroyed a collection of letters written
> by Lucia Joyce, his aunt. In 1989 he forced Brenda Maddox to delete a
> postscript concerning Lucia from her biography Nora: The Real Life of Molly
> Bloom. After 1995 he announced no permissions would be granted to quote from
> his grandfather's work. Libraries holding letters by James Joyce were unable
> to show them without permission. Versions of his work online were
> disallowed. Stephen Joyce claimed to be protecting his grandfather's and his
> family's reputation, but would sometimes grant permission to use material in
> exchange for fees that were often "extortionate".

> [In _Finnegans Wake_ ] is a hint of intimacy between father and daughter
> here that borders on incest. Lucia once remarked to her father that no
> matter how many loves she had, she could never be unfaithful to him.

> Even today among Joyceans this subject remains taboo. Regarding Lucia,
> academics have toed the Joyce party line - that she suffered fits, had
> uncontrollable sexual urges, and endlessly shouted forensic sexual details
> with involuntary abandon. For the sake of being allowed to quote from
> Joyce's papers, writers have repeatedly cast Lucia as the "problem", just as
> James and Nora always did. In effect, Lucia has been vaporised from history;
> memories of her obliterated. She is a "vanished woman".

(HN tip: Don't format a quoted paragraph like code with leading spaces, put it
all on one line with a single ">" in front, and a blank line between
paragraphs. Also, "_" doesn't work for italics but "*" does.)

~~~
hyperpallium
Thanks for that, and you're right, but... really, HN should be able to render
code-quote (leading spaces) in a mobile-friendly way.

~~~
superflyguy
Pick one of:

1) Nobody has ever brought the problem up before.

2) It's a tricky problem to solve.

3) Mobile usage is a niche fad which will go away if left alone so no point
addressing it.

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bhc
Shel Silverstein's literary estate is also known to take scholars and
biographers to court under some misguided notion of protecting the brand.

[http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/books/2013/10/my_shel_sil...](http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/books/2013/10/my_shel_silverstein_biography_can_t_quote_shel_silverstein_why.html)

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CaliforniaKarl
This should be marked [2009], but it’s still a good read!

~~~
dang
Added. Thanks!

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dgacmu
Add to the ever-growing pile of reasons to shorten the duration of copyright
protection. James Joyce died in 1941 -- under a sane copyright regime, we
would not be having this discussion. _Dubliners_ was published over 100 years
ago, and the author has been dead for 76 years.

