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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I painfully collected all the email addresses of the chunky monkeys and was going to send them an email telling them I thought they had acted unfairly and dishonorably, but my phone ate the email, I couldn’t face the thought of drafting it on my phone with my thumbs again, and I started to think it would be counter productive anyway.  Won’t anyone who has read some of the pleadings come off as crazy to them anyway?

Also, I am worried about the lawyers who have been saying they don’t think Dorland has much of a copyright case, and something else. Larson has sued for money/opportunities she would have earned but for Dorland’s alleged interference. For example, she sure for the opportunities she would have had if the story would have had wider circulation, through the one city one book festival and other print opportunities lost. For damages Larson includes lost opportunity from potential movie deal, and also noted as evidence something about a $10k bank transfer FROM her account. I am inserting whether the book festival required Larson to reimburse them the $10k cost of printing the story which they later destroyed as unusable?  But I may be misunderstanding what the $10k was. In any case, if Dorland’s claim is legally week, I worry she may wind up owing Larson a bunch of money which she doesn’t have, plus the cost of her own lawyers.  Which is weird because Larson’s attorney has been AWFUL.  Near malpractice level. Does she have a case for money damages?  Larson sure did lose money and opportunities from all of this, and while it seems like a karmic bed of her own making, the law won’t care about karma. [/quote]

They should settle. It harms both of them to continue.[/quote]

I'm a lawyer and even if Dorland's copyright claim were to fail, I doubt Larsen's tortious interference case has legs. Her problem is that all of the issues with story stem from her choice to use Dawn's letter verbatim, and then with slight changes. And her texts with the CMs demonstrate that she knew it might be a problem, that she was aware Dawn might assert some kind of claim. That makes it very hard for her to argue that Dawn's subsequent activity constituted a tort resulting in financial loss.

As even the letter from the Boston festival demonstrates, it was Larsen's decision to submit a story that was currently subject to an infringement claim. Unless the court found Dorland's copyright claim to be specious (meaning totally unfounded), Larsen is responsible for negative fallout if she chose to submit the story as her own knowing there was a possibly legitimate copyright claim. And while Dorland's claim is borderline, it's not specious -- courts have found in the past that private letters are the property of the writer, and even though Dorland posted the letter to Facebook, she did so in a private group.

This all goes back to Larsen's decision to lift the letter from the private group. If she just hadn't done that, none of this would have happened. Plus, ironically, in some of their filings Larsen's attorneys have claimed that Dorland's claim is invalid because the letter is not "essential" to Larsen's story -- the story does not need the letter in order to work or for its themes to be understood. Which is true! But then that begs the question: why use it at all? The answer is that she wanted Dorland to know the story was about her. That was a judgment error on Larsen's part, not Dorland's. So it's very hard for her to argue that Dorland's subsequent behavior were the reason she lost income from the story.

Larsen really only has herself to blame here. Dorland could have let it go, but she was not required to do so. And most of Dorland's activity came in the form of requests to Larsen's publishers and employers, not threats. In the end, Larsen could have resolved the whole thing ages ago by simply removing the letter from the story and writing around it -- turning those sentiments into dialogue using her own prose and not Dorland's. Her stubbornness in insisting she had the right to the letter, when the legality of that was in dispute, was her downfall. [/quote]

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