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Lawsuits

Page history last edited by Katie B. 10 years, 4 months ago

 

 

Since the invention of the printing press,

many have feuded in court over the book industry...

 

 

 

 

Even Gutenberg himself was sued...

 

The Gutenberg Lawsuit

Gutenberg was not a wealthy man nor did he have a steady source of income, so he borrowed the money that he needed to come up with his press from Johann Fust. Gutenberg used borrowed funds for the printing of his Bible from Fust in the amount of 2000 gulden. He was sued by Fust in 1455, and the courts ruled against him. The Printing Press Machinery and the type became the property of Fust out of the lawsuit. Johann Fust and company became the first European shop to print their name on the books that they made with the press.

 

 

There have been lawsuits regarding the censorship of books...

 

 

The Pico decision:
In 1975, several members of the school board from the Island Trees School District on Long Island, N.Y., obtained a list of books deemed “objectionable” by Parents of New York United, a conservative organization. The board determined that the district’s school libraries contained several titles on the list: The Fixer, by Bernard Malamud; Slaughterhouse Five, by Kurt Vonnegut Jr.; The Naked Ape, by Desmond Morris; Down These Mean Streets, by Piri Thomas; Best Short Stories of Negro Writers, edited by Langston Hughes; Go Ask Alice, authorship anonymous; Laughing Boy, by Oliver LaFarge; Black Boy, by Richard Wright; A Hero Ain’t Nothin’ But a Sandwich, by Alice Childress; Soul on Ice, by Eldridge Cleaver; and A Reader for Writers, edited by Jerome Archer.

 

The school district’s established policy required the school superintendent to appoint a review committee upon a receipt of a complaint about a book. Nevertheless, the board members arranged to have the books “unofficially” removed from the libraries without appointing a committee. They said the books contained “obscenities, blasphemies, brutality and perversion beyond description,” and concluded that “it is our duty, our moral obligation, to protect the children in our schools from this moral danger as surely as from physical and medical dangers.”

 

Steven Pico, a 17-year-old high school student, led a group of students who sued the board in U.S. District Court, claiming a denial of their First Amendment rights. The district court found in favor of the board, citing “respect for the traditional values of the community and deference to a school board’s substantial control over educational content.” The students appealed to the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which reversed the decision and sent the case back to the district court for trial. The school board then appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court.

A closely divided Supreme Court ruled 5 to 4 in favor of the students. School officials “cannot suppress ‘expressions of feeling with which they do not wish to contend.’”

 

First Amendment Violations

 

“Local school boards may not remove books from school library shelves simply because they dislike the ideas contained in those books …”
— U.S. Supreme Court in Board of Education, Island Trees School District v. Pico (1982)

 

The Pico case is the most important court decision to date concerning school libraries and the First Amendment. In it, the Court recognized that the First Amendment rights of students are “directly and sharply implicated” when a book is removed from a school library. Therefore, the discretion of school boards to remove books from school libraries is limited. The law requires that if a book is to be removed, an inquiry must be made as to the motivation and intention of the party calling for its removal. If the party’s intention is to deny students access to ideas with which the party disagrees, it is a violation of the First Amendment.

 

Virgil v School Board of Columbia County

In 1989, the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld a Florida school board’s removal of a previously approved classroom text because of its perceived vulgarity and sexual explicitness (Virgil v. School Board of Columbia County). Interestingly enough, the high school literature textbook was banned because it contained selections from Aristophanes’ Lysistrata and Chaucer’s The Miller’s Tale, two authors whose works were among the thousands banned under the Comstock Law in the late 19th century.

 

 

E-Book Lawsuits have been filed as well...

 

 

 

Amazon.com sued "The Kindle Ate My Homework Lawsuit"

 

Two years after the Kindle was released, a lawsuit ensued in 2009. Amazon remotely wiped Orwell's "1984" and "Animal Farm" from all Kindle e-readers, because the publisher of the e-books didn't have the right to sell them in the United States. Student, 17-year-old Justin Gawronski of Michigan and a co-plaintiff, Antoine Bruguier sued the company for removing the book that they had paid for from their e-reader. The company settled in the sum of $150,000 to be given to the plaintiffs lawyers. The moral of this story; even if you purchase an e-book, it is not a tangible item that you can hold, and you don't really "own" it. It can be taken away with the click of a button.

 

 

Google Library Case

In 2004 Google partnered with many libraries around the world to scan, and make available numerous book titles to online consumers. They skipped a major step however, and failed to obtain permission from the publishers and authors of those books. In October of 2012 Google settled with the American Association of Publishers (AAP). The details of the copy write laws were agreed by both parties to be disagreed upon, and after seven years the rest of the details have been worked out. The AAP will provide Google with titles they may scan and make available online. The AAP will than have the right to sell, and distribute those books how they deem fit. Google will have the opportunity to preview 20 pages of those books to consumers, and sell the book on Google's Play Store. Google has yet to reach an agreement with the Authors Guild.

 

E-Book Lawsuit

In April of 2012 the U.S. Department of Justice sued Apple, and five major publishing houses (Hachette, HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster, Macmillan, and Penguin) for the intent to artificially inflate the price of the e-book. Before the release of the iPad, Amazon's Kindle was the dominant e-book reader on the market. Amazon forced publishers to sell most books at $9.99. According to the Department of Justice, booksellers were unnerved by the discounted e-book price structure Amazon launched in 2007. The publishers went to Apple in late 2009 to find a way to force Amazon to raise its prices. The iPad was to be the perfect tool to accomplish that. The alleged conspiracy placed many books at so-called "agency pricing," putting them on the market for about $12.99 and giving Apple a 30% cut. About three days later, Amazon allowed publishers to set their own prices, resulting in higher prices on the Kindle as well. The Department of Justice has alleged that as a result of the arrangement, e-book customers paid between $2 and $3 more per book, amounting to upwards of $100 million more than they otherwise would have. Hachette, HarperCollins, and Simon & Schuster settled immediately, while it took longer for Apple, Macmillan, and Penguin to reach an agreement. A settlement in the case was reached recently however, and on October 14, 2012 Amazon and Apple have informed some e-book buyers that they'll receive credits for future book purchases, as part of a recent settlement three major publishers signed to settle a price-fixing lawsuit. Eligible Kindle e-book customers will receive credits ranging from 30 cents to $1.32 per book, Amazon estimated. Apple did not specify a range.

 

Books Group

 

 

Resources:

1.  "About Banned & Challenged Books." American Library Association. ALA, 1997-2012. Web. 07 Nov. 2012. http://www.ala.org/advocacy/banned/aboutbannedbooks

 

2.   Mullally, Claire. "First Amendment Center." Banned Books. N.p., 13 Sept. 2002. Web. 07 Nov. 2012. http://www.firstamendmentcenter.org/banned-books

 

 

 

Books, Present

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