1 April 2009

 

Ms. Jane Litte
Dear Author Literary Agency

[address redacted]

Dear Ms. Litte:

We are in receipt of your letter of 27 March 2009 regarding your intention to file a temporary injunction in the U. S. District Court for the Southern District of New York State on 1 April 2009 against publication of Beyond Heaving Bosoms: The Smart Bitches’ Guide to Romance Novels. You attest that the book contains email messages from members of the International Consortium of Heroes (ICH). You state that these email messages were stolen and therefore constitute improper publication of creative content and furthermore reveal trade secrets and violate the privacy of the ICH, which is responsible for sourcing various hero archetypes to the romance industry.

The email messages in question appear in the chapter of Beyond Heaving Bosoms which details the sexual responsibility of the hero in the context of a romance novel and allegedly reveal secret information regarding some ICH resistance to sourcing heroes specifically for male-male romances. Both Ms. Wendell and Ms. Tan state that the email messages were released to them by the ICH with the full knowledge and permission of the individuals in question.

It is our position that use of these email messages constitutes “fair use,” since the messages are included in the text for journalistic purposes. Moreover, the allegation that publication would reveal trade secrets is an unsound argument, since the nature of a “trade secret” requires that you keep those methods reasonably secret.  The ICH’s methods of sourcing heroic archetypes are hardly a secret, since those methods are demonstrated over the history of the romance genre’s development. If a “trade secret” is revealed through hero archetypes placed in romance after romance read by millions of women, it’s no longer a secret.

The grounds for this temporary injunction are patently ridiculous, nefarious in intent, and unfounded to the extreme. We will be asking for sanctions against you and against the International Consortium of Heroes. It is our intention to file a resistance to the temporary injunction and demand a hearing on the matter as soon as possible.

While we at Simon & Schuster/Touchstone Fireside were particularly looking forward to the scheduled release of this book, we take any allegations of copyright infringement and theft very seriously, and we will defend our authors and this book.

Yours sincerely,

J.H. Crawford
Touchstone/Fireside
A Division of Simon & Schuster

cc: Sulay Hernandez, Editor, Touchstone Fireside, a division of Simon and Schuster
Daniel Lazar, Writer’s House
Sarah Wendell, Smart Bitches Trashy Books LLC
Candy Tan, Smart Bitches Trashy Books LLC