The Guild aims to “impound” the collection until the matter is settled in court. Follow this PDF link to see the complaint. The copyright suit was leveled against HathiTrust, the University of Michigan, the University of California, the University of Wisconsin, Indiana University, and Cornell University.

The six authors who joined the suit included  novelists Angelo Loukakis, Roxana Robinson, Daniele Simpson, and Fay Weldon, children’s author Pat Cummings, poet Andre Roy, scholar James Shapiro and biographer T.J. Stiles. The University of Michigan planned to allow faculty and students to download copies of orphaned works in this digital collection.

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UPDATE: Spokesperson Ann Marie Bishop told ABC News: “We’ve immediately discontinued sales of that T-shirt. It was only online … We agreed that the shirt does not deliver an appropriate message.” The link to the shirt has been removed from the site, but follow this link to see an archived image.

The shirt featured hearts, flowers and an unfinished math problem doodled around the slogan, discouraging writing and math in a single swipe. What do you think? Follow this link to read more Twitter responses.

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Earlier this week, Publish America offered to deliver customers’ books to Rowling’s home for $49. The offer has since been removed, but here’s a cached copy of the other from Google (via). The author’s spokesperson told the AP that Rowling would seek “appropriate action.” Cretella responded by attacking the statement, apparently attributing a passage from the AP article to Rowling’s camp.

Here’s an excerpt from the letter: “[Y]our client’s spokesperson, Mark Hutchinson, published a false and defamatory statement to the media, indicating that PA had been cited by industry watchdogs for ‘allegedly deceiving authors.’ Of course, there are no legitimate industry watchdogs who have ever said anything of the sort. The ones who have made such representations have been totally discredited … No reasonable person would ever rely upon anything they said. By doing so, your client and her representatives have subjected themselves to a defamation suit.”

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Bloomberg reports that Ali’s complaint alleges that Kobo used his famous slogan, “float like a butterfly, sting like a bee,” without consent. The slogan and Ali’s name both appeared in a Kobo advertisement featured in The New York Times.

Here’s more from the article: “Ali, 69, seeks a court order blocking Kobo’s use of the slogan and unspecified damages. The advertisement ‘made commercial use of the Muhammad Ali slogan and Muhammad Ali’s name without permission from or compensation to Muhammad Ali Enterprises,’ according to the complaint.” (via Publishers Lunch)

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Ayn Rand has inspired a group of conservative Christians to attack Republican leaders for reading Rand’s books.

The American Values Network launched a campaign (including the video embedded above) criticizing Rand’s atheism and the Republican leaders who celebrate her books.

Here’s more from the group: “GOP leaders and conservative pundits have brought upon themselves a crisis of values. Many who for years have been the loudest voices invoking the language of faith and moral values are now praising the atheist philosopher Ayn Rand whose teachings stand in direct contradiction to the Bible. Rand advocates a law of selfishness over love and commands her followers to think only of themselves, not others. She said her followers had to choose between Jesus and her teachings.” (Via Swampland)

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Wall Street Journal reporter Meghan Cox Gordon criticized themes of “explicit abuse, violence and depravity” in YA fiction over the weekend. As of this writing, her controversial essay has received 71 comments and 152 responses on Facebook.

Here’s more from the article: “Now, whether you care if adolescents spend their time immersed in ugliness probably depends on your philosophical outlook. Reading about homicide doesn’t turn a man into a murderer; reading about cheating on exams won’t make a kid break the honor code. But the calculus that many parents make is less crude than that: It has to do with a child’s happiness, moral development and tenderness of heart. Entertainment does not merely gratify taste, after all, but creates it.”

What do you think? The YA community responded with scores of online essays and the #YAsaves twitter hashtag. Below, we’ve listed tweets from several popular YA authors. The video embedded above features the band Tiger Beat performing their musical homage to the genre “YA Song.”

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Naipaul (pictured, via) remarked: “I read a piece of writing and within a paragraph or two I know whether it is by a woman or not. I think [it is] unequal to me … My publisher, who was so good as a taster and editor, when she became a writer, lo and behold, it was all this feminine tosh. I don’t mean this in any unkind way.”

Angry readers have responded in the article’s comments section and on Twitter. The Guardian to create “The Naipaul Test,” analyzing readers’ ability to guess an author’s gender.

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In April, Tasini (pictured, via) filed a class action lawsuit against Arianna Huffington, The Huffington Post and AOL. The suit includes an estimated 9,000 unpaid bloggers and seeks damages of at least $105 million.

Here’s an excerpt from the motion (PDF link): “many of the 216 blog postings cited in the Complaint demonstrate on their face that Mr. Tasini took full advantage of the platform The Huffington Post gave him. They show, for example, that Mr. Tasini used his Huffington Post blog to sell copies of books he authored, to link to his personal ‘micro-blogging’ account at the Twitter.com website, and to announce one of his Senatorial campaigns and solicit donations for another.” (Via PaidContent)

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In the video embedded above, ABC News pitted a 12-year-old boy from a bestselling book against a physicist with some bestselling books, asking the classic question: “Does heaven exist?”

On Sunday, Stephen Hawking told The Guardian: “I regard the brain as a computer which will stop working when its components fail. There is no heaven or afterlife for broken down computers; that is a fairy story for people afraid of the dark.”

Journalist Diane Sawyer challenged the physicist through an interview with Colton Burpo,  the boy who recounted his near-death experience and trip to heaven in the popular book, Heaven Is for Real. What’s your opinion about the newest installment of this age-old debate?

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World Net Daily founder Joseph Farah had this statement: “We are exploring our legal options right now … There is no question of damages from this irresponsible attack. This book was released yesterday. Our author is in day two of a media tour. This report is playing havoc with a bestselling book – and there is little question that is the intent.”

Esquire added this update to the controversial post: “[They] accuse the President of the United States of perpetrating a fraud on the world by having released a forged birth certificate. Not because this claim is in any way based on reality, but to hold their terribly gullible audience captive to their lies, and to sell books. This is despicable, and deserves only ridicule. That’s why we committed satire in the matter of the Corsi book. Hell, even the president has a sense of humor about it all.”

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Earlier this week, Dean criticized Minnesota’s House Legacy Funding Division for paying Gaiman to appear at a speaking engagement.

Dean told Minnesota Public Radio: “[My mom] was very angry this morning and always taught me to not be a name caller. And I shouldn’t have done it, and I apologize.”  Dean still insisted that the author should have “donated his time” to the patrons of the Stillwater Library.

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According to the StarTribune, Republican representative Dean Urdahl proposed a new amendment that would make Minnesota-based cultural groups compete for funding.

Gaiman responded with this tweet: “Sad & funny. Minnesota Republicans have a ‘hate’ list. Like Nixon did. I’m on it. They also don’t like capitalism.” He also pointed to a blog entry about “political football” over the speaking engagement in question.

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The Washington Post explained: “The flap is gaining attention in the intense world of Malcolm X studies, where theories about the civil rights leader’s life can be as polarizing as the man himself. The controversy was reported Wednesday on Richard Prince’s Journal-isms media criticism blog.”

The review, entitled “Paper Tiger: Manning Marable’s Poison Pen,” strongly criticized the biography. According to the Post, managing editor Joel Dreyfuss informed Evanzz that the piece would not be published and Evanzz received a $100 kill fee. (via Ron Charles)

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Here’s an excerpt: “I think there’s a lot of support out there. I keep getting emails from a whole variety of writers who want to join on as plaintiffs, who are giving us all sorts of inside information. There still is a lot of fear out there. Some of the people expressing opposition to what we’re doing are just bootlickers. I think people fear being blacklisted.”

At the same time, Gawker investigated the author in a long post entitled “Guy Suing HuffPo for Not Paying Bloggers Doesn’t Pay Bloggers.” Yesterday Arianna Huffington criticized the suit and Tasini’s “pile of bile.”

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Here’s more from Huffington: “The key point that the lawsuit completely ignores (or perhaps fails to understand) is how new media, new technologies, and the linked economy have changed the game, enabling millions of people to shift their focus from passive observation to active participation … The same people who never question why someone would sit on a couch and watch TV for eight hours straight can’t understand why someone would find it rewarding to weigh in on the issues — great and small — that interest them. For free. They don’t understand the people who contribute to Wikipedia for free, who maintain their own blogs for free, who tweet for free, who constantly refresh and update their Facebook pages for free, and who want to help tell the stories of what is happening in their lives and in their communities… for free.”

Follow this link to read more about the suit that includes an estimated 9,000 bloggers and seeks damages of “an amount to be determined at trial but not less than $105 million.”

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