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.
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.
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.)
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
> 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.
> 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".
> When the Central Bank of Ireland issued a ten euro James Joyce commemorative coin on 10 April 2013, Stephen Joyce described the coin and the circumstances of its issue as "one of the greatest insults to the Joyce family that has ever been perpetrated in Ireland".
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.
> 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.)
> 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.
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.
