Joyce Copyright Expires, Ending Grandson’s Reign of Terror
Happy New Year! Consider celebrating by staging a seasonal reading of “The Dead” in Dublin, which you can now do for free! Yes, on January 1, 2012, all of James Joyce’s writings published during his lifetime entered the public domain in the EU, freeing up the characters, stories, and words for use by ordinary people. Though already available to Canadians and Australians, and partially available to Americans, public domain status for Joyce’s works in his home country of Ireland has a lot of people very excited.
The new availability of Joyce’s writings is more important than one would expect for two reasons: Bloomsday, and Stephen Joyce. June 16, the day of the events in Joyce’s Ulysses, is Bloomsday, when celebrations of Joyce occur around the world. These celebrations are particularly enthusiastic in Dublin, where the novel is set, and they generally include public readings of Ulysses. In previous years, readings in the EU required permission from the Joyce estate. Stephen Joyce, James Joyce’s grandson and only living descendant, has control of that estate and has blocked many public performances of his work in recent years. This year, Bloomsday celebrators will be free to observe the occasion as they see fit.
Stephen Joyce also has a tempestuous relationship with the scholarly community, resulting in aggressively pursuing anyone who tries to use Joyce’s writing as part of a scholarly endeavor (the estate has even gone so far as to threaten to sue biochemists who programmed a Joyce quotation into a bacterial genome). He appears to be motivated by a combination of mistrust of scholarship and a strong desire to protect the family’s privacy—laudable purposes, perhaps, if the result weren’t such a radical stifling of any public discussion. In 2006, the author of a book on James Joyce’s daughter Lucia filed suit against the estate with the help of Lawrence Lessig and the Fair Use Project, arguing that the Joyce Estate had engaged in copyright misuse. The estate settled in 2007, allowing the author to publish the material and eventually agreeing to pay her attorneys’ fees. In the EU, where fair use is not expressly recognized, a scholar might not be so lucky.
The new freedom of EU scholars, writers, and performers to use Joyce’s writings without having to satisfy a hard-to-please copyright holder should make 2012 a great year for Joyce fans. But it’s not just the European Joyceans who have something to celebrate: in the US, Joyce’s unpublished and unregistered works also enter public domain this year, joining his pre-1923 published writings.
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Nothing is ever simple with copyright, and the "reign of terror" lives on. As you know, Joyce's unpublished works are protected by copyright in the UK through 2039. Few scholarly publishers will proceed with a project that cannot be marketed in the UK. That means an American author who wants to use unpublished Joyce material in a new study will still need to seek the permission of the Joyce estate in order to ensure that the resulting work can be sold in the UK even though the material is in the public domain in the US. Even posting the material on a web site in the US might lead to legal liability in the UK.
In spite of the enthusiastic title, you were very careful to delineate the limited scope of the change in the body of your text. Not only did you limit the public domain additions in the EU to published works, you also correctly excluded works that were first published posthumously. Nevertheless, it would still be wise for someone who wants to use Joyce's works to consult the "Joyce & Copyright" FAQ at https://joycefoundation.osu.edu/joyce-copyright.
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Hi Peter,
You are, of course, correct about the UK copyright and the difficulties it poses for print publication (and Joyce's post-1923 published works, including his published letters, are still protected in the U.S. as well). However, I would hope that country-specific IP blocking, though an imperfect system, would allow more online publication. Carol Schloss's extra-literary material on Lucia was published on a U.S.-only website, for example.
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Thank you for an interesting an balanced article. May I ask two questions:
(1) With Ulysses having entered into the public domain in the UK and Ireland might I now publish a novel there with draws liberally from that work without having to concern myself about copyright complications?
(2) If that novel were to be published in let's say London would it be available for purschase in the USA?
Thank you,
John
Apologies for having written the above in haste and sending a communiqué pockmarked by so many infelicities.
John