The estate of author James Joyce is notoriously litigious, so much so that one would think that works like Joyce's novel Ulysses were moneymakers on the scale of Tolkien's Lord of the Rings, or J. K. Rowling's Harry Potter books, or, at the very least, Dan Brown's oeuvre. They are not, despite generations of pallid undergraduates being forced to read about Steven Daedelus, and even more less pallid, and slightly more erudite graduate students eagerly constructing narrative out of Finnegan's Wake. Don't mistake me, please; I rather like Ulysses, but I like it in the manner in which I also like to reverse engineer software problems.

The American copyright history of Ulysses is tangled, in part because parts of the novel were initially published in serial sections of The Little Review, between 1918 and 1920, with copyright in the name of the editor at Margaret Anderson. The entire thing was then published by Sylvia Beach in Paris, in 1922. The eventual 1934 American edition was based on re-setting the type of a pirated Paris edition, and included revisions to the sections in the previously published serialization in The Little Review. Quite honestly, the copyright of any American edition at all is exceedingly confusing; the best discussion I've seen is in Julie Sloan Brannon's Who Reads Ulysses?: The Rhetoric Of The Joyce Wars And The Common Reader (Routledge, 2003). The subsequent publication of the re-edited Gabler edition in 1986 just confused matters further—and essentially gave the Joyce estate and Random House, the U. S. publisher, a rather lovely long-term income stream. The Estate's apparent willingness to consult with the scholarly community on a "new" and "corrected" edition was not as selfless as it might seem; it meant the potential for a new copyright, and new expiration date.

The recent announcement of a new "budget Ulysses" from Wordsworth Editions, a tiny three-person British publisher, in January of 2010 is less a sign of the Joyce estate being generous than it is the Joyce estate realizing that their copyright expires in 2012, which means any publisher can legally produce editions of the literary classic. By signing a contract with Wordsworth Editions for a flat fee the estate has a final dying grasp on the text, since the Wordsworth budget edition has two years to gain the top seat before others enter the ring. I note that they are using the uncorrected 1932 British edition for their base text.