Houston Estate Planning and Elder Law Attorney Blog
A lawsuit was filed against the Salinger Literary Trust by the Devault Graves Agency, a publishing house, in March 2015. The publishing company said that the trust was interfering with its ability to license its edition of a book titled J.D. Salinger: Three Early Stories that it wanted to publish in foreign countries. The lawsuit was filed in Tennessee because the Devault-Graves Agency is based in Memphis, Tennessee. The court dismissed the lawsuit saying it had no jurisdiction to hear the case, and granted the publisher's request to transfer the case to New Hampshire, the author's home state.
Publisher's Weekly reported on this development in "Court Punts Salinger Copyright Case to New Hampshire."
The details of this lawsuit are complex. The stories in the book are part of the public domain in the United States, which means they do not have copyright protection and anyone can publish them.