We have been following this case since 1999. Now the case is back in the news:
Penguin Group wins ruling
Appeals court reverses judgment that blocked sales of Parker poems
By Bloomberg News
An appeals court reversed a judge’s ruling that blocked Penguin Group USA from selling a collection of Dorothy Parker poems because of a copyright violation alleged by a man who assembled them in an earlier compilation.
The decision overturns an injunction handed down in 2003 by U.S. District Judge John Keenan, who said Penguin’s “Dorothy Parker: Complete Poems” violated a copyright held by Stuart Silverstein for a 1996 collection, “Not Much Fun: the Lost Poems of Dorothy Parker.”
Pearson Plc, the world’s largest textbook publisher and owner of the Financial Times, also owns Penguin, which publishes books by Tom Clancy and the Dalai Lama.
The U.S. 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals in New York said the copyright asserted by Silverstein “is too slight” to support an injunction.
The court said the case hinges on how much creative work he did in his “selection and categorization of some works as ‘poems’ that were written by Mrs. Parker.”