Joyce estate mounts court challenge to 'cleaned-up' Ulysses

The publishers of a cleaned up "reader-friendly" edition of James Joyce’s masterpiece Ulysses were today accused in court of copyright infringement and "passing-off".

Lawyers for the trustees of the author’s estate told a British High Court judge that the 1997 publication contained material, including punctuation and correct spelling, which Joyce had not included in the final draft of his "stream of consciousness" novel, first published in Paris in 1922.

John Baldwin QC said the 1997 book, edited by Danis Rose and published by Picador under the Macmillan imprint, was being "passed off as something which it is not".

He reminded Mr Justice Lloyd that Ulysses - written over seven years and recounting a single day in the Dublin life of two characters, Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus - was "no ordinary work" and had been hailed as the greatest novel of the 20th Century.

Copyright in the 1922 original expired 50 years after the author’s death in 1941.

But Joyce’s unused manuscript material, which was not published until the James Joyce Archive was established in 1977, was still protected by copyright extending 50 years from the date of its publication.

Macmillan had no licence to use that material, Mr Baldwin said.

The two-week hearing, in which Joyce’s estate is claiming damages and an injunction against Macmillan and Mr Rose, was adjourned until Thursday.