A Novel
by Paul Goldstein
Meet Michael Seeley, defender of artists rights, take-no-prisoners intellectual property litigatorand a man on the brink of personal and career collapse. So when United Pictures virtually demands that he fly out to Hollywood to confirm legally that they own the rights to their corporate cash-cow franchise of Spykiller films, he has little choice but to comply.
What Michael Seeley discovers in these gilded precincts will plunge him headfirst into the tangle of politics of the blacklisting era and then into the even darker world of Nazi-occupied Poland. Hell encounter Mayer Bermann, the steely Polish émigré who founded United Picturesand who may lose control of it to a ruthless conglomerate; Bert Cobb, the putative author of the original Spykiller screenplay; Harry Devlin, the flamboyant defender of Hollywood writers who has his own secrets; and Julia Walsh, an alluring young USC film scholar whose research may hold the key to the mystery of Spykiller's true authorship. As the pressure mounts for Seeley to confirm United Picturess ownership of the franchise, Seeley must face down his own demons and finally travel to Munich to confront the reclusive novelist Max Kanarek, who fled Hollywood decades before and whose boyhood link to Mayer Bermann is the tantalizing missing piece of the puzzle.
"[S]pins out a fresh, sharp-witted drama about Hollywoods blacklist. . . . Goldstein, who does a fine job of breaking down complicated moral, ethical and historical issues to understandable nuggets, has laid the foundation for what could be a strong franchise." - Publishers Weekly.
"Well-intentioned and reasonably well-written but lacking a fresh point of view." - Kirkus Reviews.
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Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Paul Goldstein was born in Mt. Vernon, New York on January 14, 1943. He graduated from Brandeis University in 1964 and from Columbia Law School in 1967, and started his law teaching career at the State University of New York at Buffalo that year. In 1975 he moved to Stanford Law School as Professor of Law and in 1985 was appointed the Lillick Professor of Law at Stanford. From 1985-1986 he served as Chairman of the U.S. Office of Technology Assessment Advisory Panel on Intellectual Property Rights in an Age of Electronics and Information. In April 1997 Newsweek magazine named Mr. Goldstein to its "list of 100 people for the new century," as one "whose creativity or talent or brains or leadership will make a difference in the years ahead."
Goldstein is the author of five novels: Legal Asylum: A Comedy, Secret Justice; the bestsellers Errors and Omissions, A Patent Lie and Havana Requiem, which received the 2013 Harper Lee Prize for Legal Fiction. He is also the author of two general interest non-fiction books, Copyright's Highway: From Gutenberg to the Celestial Jukebox and Intellectual Property: The Tough New Realities That Could Make or Break Your Business. Mr. Goldstein has written two leading treatises on copyright law – the five-volume Goldstein on Copyright and the one-volume International Copyright: Principles, Law and Practice – as well as four widely-adopted law school textbooks.
Since 1985 Mr. Goldstein has been the Lillick Professor of Law at Stanford Law School where he has twice received the John Bingham Hurlbut Award for Excellence in Teaching. He has testified before congressional committees on intellectual property legislation, been an invited expert at international governmental meetings on copyright issues, and is a member of the editorial boards of leading intellectual property publications in England, Germany and Switzerland. He has served as Visiting Scholar at the Max Planck Institute for Foreign and International Patent, Copyright and Competition Law in Munich, Germany, and is a member of the founding faculty of the Munich Intellectual Property Law Center.
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