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Author Nedim Gürsel, who was charged with insulting Islam after the publication of his 2008 novel The Daughters of Allah, was acquitted yesterday by a court in Istanbul. According to the Turkish news network BIA, the court said that “the novel as a whole does not have any criminal intent and does not represent a crime.”
A federal judge in New York City has issued a ten-day restraining order blocking the U.S. publication of Fredrik Colting’s 60 Years Later: Coming Through the Rye. In her Wednesday ruling, judge Deborah Batts said she needed more time to determine whether the unauthorized sequel to The Catcher in the Rye was allowable under “fair use” provisions.
The author sued earlier this month by J. D. Salinger for usurping rights to The Catcher in the Rye has come forward with a defense of what Salinger called a "rip-off, pure and simple" of his classic novel.
J. D. Salinger is taking legal action against the writer of an alleged sequel to The Catcher in the Rye.
A New York City judge approved on Tuesday a four-month extension of the deadline for authors to agree or object to a settlement with Google Inc. over its massive book-scanning venture.
A Turkish court recently dropped charges against novelist Orhan Pamuk for insulting “Turkishness” in a comment on the country’s history. In February 2005 Pamuk told the Swiss newspaper Tages Anzeiger that Turkey has yet to confront both the Armenian genocide during World War I and violence in the country’s Kurdish southeast in the 1980s and '90s
On April 4, United States District Court Judge John F. Keenan ruled in favor of Stuart Y. Silverstein in a plagiarism suit he filed against Penguin Putnam in 2001. Silverstein, who compiled Not Much Fun: The Lost Poems of Dorothy Parker (Scribner, 1996), claimed in his lawsuit that Penguin infringed on his copyright by publishing Dorothy Parker: Complete Poems, which includes a section titled “Poems Uncollected by Parker,” the identical poems published in Not Much Fun.
British novelist Hong Ying faces a "defamation of the dead" lawsuit in China for her book K: The Art of Love, a fictional portrayal of the love affair between Bloomsbury poet Julian Bell and the celebrated Chinese writer and painter Ling Shuhua.
Public allegations of plagiarism are leveled at unsuspecting authors at least once a year, but their frequency doesn't diminish the calamitous results: bruised reputations, soured accusers, disenchanted readers, and riled media. This spectacle isn't, however, an invention of our media-saturated age. Public fascination with plagiarism is as old as our appetite for scandal.
