Joyce estate settles copyright dispute with US academic

THE JAMES Joyce Estate has agreed to pay $240,000 (€164,000) in legal costs incurred by an American academic following a long-running copyright dispute between the two sides.

The settlement brings to an end a legal saga that pre-dates the publication in 2003 of a controversial biography of Joyce’s daughter, Lucia, written by Stanford University academic Carol Shloss.

The Joyce estate, which is fiercely protective of its right to the author's works, refused to let Prof Shloss use copyrighted material in her book, Lucia Joyce: To Dance in the Wake.

The book, which portrayed Joyce's mentally ill daughter as the muse for Finnegans Wake, received mixed reviews, but Prof Shloss blamed this on the fact that her publisher had removed important citations to avoid legal action.

Prof Shloss later sued the Joyce estate and reached a settlement in 2007 that allowed her to restore the material in the United States and on the internet. A federal judge in San Jose, California, in May awarded Prof Shloss $329,000 in legal fees and costs, but the Joyce estate dropped its appeal last week and agreed to a $240,000 settlement.

The outcome of the case will not create a legal precedent, since the excerpts of Joyce’s letters and works were eventually published by way of settlement. However, Prof Shloss, a consulting professor of English at Stanford, described it as a “breakthrough”.

“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,” she said.

Relations between the Joycean academic community and the Joyce estate are often fraught, with the author’s grandson and co-trustee of the estate Stephen Joyce implacably determined to protect his grandfather’s legacy and his family’s privacy.

Greg Castanias, a Washington-based partner of the law firm Jones Day, which represented the Joyce estate, told The Irish Timesthe settlement was significantly less than it would have cost to mount an appeal and therefore was a "sound business decision".

“Given that it’s substantially less than the court’s ruling, and it is also less than it would have cost the estate to brief and argue and appeal from the case, it was a decision that made enormous practical sense,” Mr Castanias said.

“The estate believed, and still believes, that it had strong arguments on appeal to have the attorney’s fee award eliminated, but given the cost of pursuing an appeal, this result made the most sense.”