In regard to the HarperCollins’s lawsuit against Open Road over the Julie of the Wolves e-book, I received an email from Open Road representative Josh Raffel today with a couple of brief statements from Chris Davis, Open Road’s COO.
Of the case itself, Davis writes:
“It appears to us that HarperCollins is trying to intimidate authors, overturn established law and grab rights that were not in existence when the contracts were signed many years ago. We are confident that we will successfully defend authors’ rights and we look forward to filing our response in court.”
He also notes that the company has hired a legal team with a great deal of experience in arguing authors’-rights cases:
“We are planning to engage Michael J. Boni and Joanne Zack of Boni and Zack in association with Robert La Rocca of Kohn, Swift & Graf, PC, who have been at the forefront of representing authors’ rights. They prevailed in the landmark Rosetta case and represent authors in cases on behalf of a class of freelance writers against periodical publishers and electronic databases and book authors against Google.”
Of course, the proof of the pudding is in the eating—we won’t really know how the case is going to turn until we start seeing rulings from the judge, and the differences between this case and the Rosetta Books case could prove instructive. I look forward to reading the case’s future filings.
