The public may now be developing a love affair with e-books, but they may have lost their romance for some of Harlequin’s authors. Three such authors are suing Harlequin over a matter of miscalculated e-book royalties. Barbara Keiler, Mona Kay Thomas and Linda Barrett allege (PDF) that Harlequin used a tax-purposes subsidiary, Harlequin Swiss, to cheat them out of e-book royalties between 1994 by basing their “50% of receipts” rate on the money Swiss received from Harlequin, rather than the money Harlequin received from selling the books. Authors thus ended up getting between 24 and 32 cents per...

Remember how Amazon has based its European operations in Luxembourg due to that country’s lower value-added tax rate on e-books? And France has reduced its own rate? Today the European Commission served notice that it was launching an investigation into whether these countries had broken European Union law by reducing those rates. The first step involves sending the governments of those countries a letter asking them to explain themselves, and if they don’t provide a satisfactory explanation within one month the European Commission could ask them to change their laws, or launch "infringement procedures”. As Philip...

The Atlantic reports on a new 20-page legal brief objecting to the terms of the Department of Justice settlement, filed by nine major independent publishers: Abrams Books, Chronicle Books, Grove/Atlantic Inc. Chicago Review Press, Inc, New Directions Publishing Corp., W.W. Norton & Company, Perseus Books Group, the Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, and Workman Publishing. These publishers object to the settlement on similar grounds to everyone else who has objected—it will allow Amazon to prosper at the expense of publishers, and is thus contrary to the public interest. The publishers complain that the DoJ never talked to independent...

I’m glad I paid extra for the upgrade to unlimited free popcorn refills. Techdirt and Ars Technica are reporting on the continuing saga of Righthaven’s “Schroedinger’s CEO” Steve Gibson and his attempt to hire more lawyers to continue litigating one of the cases the copyright troll infamously lost. The Techdirt piece largely covers Gibson’s tortured arguments that the court-appointed receiver, Lara Pearson, lacks the authority to fire him. The reasoning seems to boil down to a bunch of legalese about the nature of limited liability companies. Gibson insists he does have the right to hire additional lawyers to argue...

Here’s an interesting software ruling out of European courts that might have implications for digital music and e-book resale. The Wall Street Journal reports that Oracle sued a German software company, UsedSoft, that buys up and resells used software licenses from American companies. In that case, the European Court of Justice has decided in favor of UsedSoft, stating that "The exclusive right of distribution of a copy of a computer program covered by such a [used] license is exhausted on its first sale.” Thus, it’s perfectly all right, at least in Europe, to sell your licensed software, regardless...

The time to submit comments to the DoJ about the proposed price-fixing settlement has ended, and the Authors Guild filed its own comments on Monday. Publishers Weekly has a post containing the full text of the rather lengthy open letter from Executive Director Paul Aiken, as well as some commentary. There’s not a whole lot that’s new in the Authors Guild’s position from the various editorials of theirs we’ve covered over the last few months, but it does go into a considerable amount of detail as to what they see as Amazon’s domination of many areas of the publishing...

Crain’s New York Business has a profile of Tor’s plan for a DRM-free e-book store. (The article is paywalled, but you can read it via Google News search.) It summarizes the situation with the DoJ antitrust lawsuit, and points to that suit and the success of the DRM-free Harry Potter e-book store as the reason publishers are seriously considering DRM-free options. That said, there is some new material here. Tor founder Tom Doherty and manager of science fiction Patrick Nielsen Hayden talk about wanting to build the kind of “diverse retail economy” you see in bookstores, and are in...

At the risk of mixing metaphors, just when I thought we could stick a fork in the popcorn-munching saga of copyright troll Righthaven, it lurches back from the grave to spread more amusement. Techdirt reports that, six months after being set aside by a court placing their company in receivership, it comes out that Steve and Raisha Gibson, formerly CEO and COO of Righthaven respectively, have hired another law firm to represent the company in one of its big defeats. This came to light when said law firm attempted to file some documents in the appeal six months late. ...

Here are a couple of updates on the DoJ vs. publishers + Apple antitrust suit. From CNet comes the story of a small legal tiff between the DoJ and the publishers who did agree to settle. Hachette, HarperCollins, and Simon & Schuster—publishers who accepted the DoJ’s proposed terms—have filed papers asking a court to declare them “non parties” to the upcoming lawsuit. This would mean they wouldn’t be obligated to provide discovery—that is, turn over documents and other evidence to lawyers for the DoJ and the publishers plus Apple who are being sued—unless some other party to the...

Some friends called my attention to an interesting-looking book: Fan Fiction and Copyright: Outsider Works and Intellectual Property Protection by Aaron Schwabach—a legal textbook examining the copyright issues surrounding fanfic. At $81 for the paper form or $70 for a Google e-book, it’s obviously meant for the edification of college or law students, not the enjoyment of one such as you or I. That being said, I found an interesting review of it by Stacey M. Lantagne in the peer-reviewed journal Transformative Works and Cultures. Lantagne’s review gives a pretty good idea of what the book is about, and...

American Booksellers Association CEO Oren Teicher has posted the text of his letter to the Justice Department commenting on the proposed antitrust settlement with the three Agency Five publishers who agreed to settle. As with the recent Barnes & Noble filing, Teicher concentrates on the harm that such a settlement would allow Amazon to do to its competition—in this case the independent bookstores that make up the ABA. Teicher points out that agency pricing is the only thing that allowed independent bookstores selling e-books through the ABA’s IndieCommerce subsidiary (currently using Google Books’s reseller program, but changing to another...

Publishers Weekly reports that as of June 12th, the Department of Justice had received over 150 letters relating to the proposed price-fixing charges filed against Apple and the Agency Five publishers, totaling over 200 pages of material. In a filing, the DoJ said it expected “a similar or greater” amount of additional letters by the time the comment period ends on June 25th, and asked Judge Denise Cote to allow it to forego the usual print publication of the letters in the Federal Register. The DoJ would instead post the letters to the antitrust division website and post the address...