By: E&P Staff The Associated Press on Friday disclosed several details about former President Bill Clinton's account of his affair with Monica Lewinsky, drawn from his forthcoming memoir, "My Life." With that, lawyers for the book's publisher, Knopf, sent a letter to the AP arguing that the news organization had violated copyright laws, and demanding that it stop.
"We disagree completely with their legal conclusions concerning our story," a spokesman, Jack Stokes, wrote in an e-mail message to The New York Times.
The Times, by then, had obtained its own copy (from a bookstore, it said) and printed more details on Saturday in a front-page account. It called the book "sprawling" and in part "undisciplined."
The newspaper claimed that legal experts "said a publisher had scant hope of keeping the contents under wraps after a copy fell into a reporter's hands."
Knopf had agreed to let numerous TV outlets interview Clinton over the weekend and Monday before the book' release on Tuesday, and kept the book under wraps, refusing to sell excerpts in advance. A Knopf lawyer cited precedents, but other lawyers indicated AP was safe because it had stuck to the "facts" from the book without extensive verbatim quotes.
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