A settlement in the year-old battle between Simon & Schuster and the Associated Press over leaks from Hillary Clinton’s “Living History” will require the news agency to institute a training program on copyright law.
Simon & Schuster had established a one-day laydown in June 2003, an increasingly common publishing practice that prevents reviewers and news organizations from seeing – or reporting on – the book in advance of the set date. But the Associated Press obtained a copy of the book without the publisher’s permission and ran several excerpts from it, including the senator’s now-famous reaction to learning of her husband’s infidelity.
Simon & Schuster Publisher David Rosenthal said at the time that the house was “looking at all options” against the news organization, including a lawsuit.
A statement released by Simon & Schuster yesterday said the training program “resolves” the dispute. It does not say whether there were other requirements for resolution.
“We value our relationship with AP and other media outlets,” Carolyn Reidy, president of the Adult Publishing Group at Simon & Schuster, said in the statement. “[We] hoped from the start that we would be able to resolve our dispute in a manner that recognized our shared interests in both the free reporting of the news and the protection of intellectual property rights.”
In June, the AP came under fire for a similar offense, when it obtained and revealed information from an advance, embargoed copy of former president Bill Clinton’s “My Life.” Executives at Knopf (a division of Random House) said they considered similar action.