About 15 years ago, an aspiring writer named Lynne Freeman wrote a young-adult novel with a werewolf as a main character, found an agent, but couldn't get a publisher to buy it. And that was that, writes Katy Waldman in the New Yorker—until Freeman picked up the novel Crave more than a decade later and felt she'd been ripped off. Freeman has since embarked on a copyright infringement campaign. Among the fishy-seeming circumstances: Her former agent now represents the author of Crave, Tracy Wolff, and the book's acknowledgments mention an editor who handled Freeman's submission at the Entangled publishing house. Freeman is convinced that her ex-agent and the CEO of Entangled shared her manuscript with Wolff "and used it as the basis for the Crave series." All adamantly deny it.
Waldman compares the works and finds some "startling" similarities, adding that "the preponderance of commonalities and the sum of how they unfold" are difficult to discount. But here is where things get complicated: The books are in what's known as the "romantasy" genre, whose "reliance on tropes poses a challenge for questions of copyright," writes Waldman. Meaning, you're going to find similarities between many books on this particular shelf in the bookstore. The question is whether the similarities in this case go too far. Freeman has bet her house on it, literally—she has had to sell her home in Alaska to cover six-figure legal costs. Wolff, for her part, insists, "I didn't do what I'm accused of" and says she has been "devastated" by the accusation. And the publishing house fears a loss could lead "bad actors to weaponize copyright law." (Read the full story.)
,
uBlock 
,
and
Ghostery 
)
